I've said many times in the past that I think the sword and sorcery film is about the hardest genre there is to pull off believably - one small mis-step on any number of points and the whole thing just falls apart. Slightly easier, but still pretty damn tough, is the straight up sword film, a factor that has led to the virtual end of the genre, though it now seems to be making a comeback. There are the Arn crusader films coming out of Scandanavia, a big period epic in the works in Spain, and now medieval teen adventure De Brief Voor De Koning out of the Netherlands.
Thiuri is nearly a knight. He only has to complete one test and he will be knighted. He only has to wake one night in the chapel without talking and without opening the door. Then someone knocks at the door of the chapel and asks for help. Risking his knighthood Tiuri opens the door and helps the guy asking for help. Tiuri has to deliver a letter to a knight in the forest which contains an important message for a befriended king. When Tiuri finds the knight, the knight is deadly wounded and asks Tiuri to deliver the letter. Tiuri hesitates, but accepts the mission. The adventure begins....
Period detail is very nice on this and the action quotient looks surprisingly high for a teen oriented film ... check it out in the Twitch Player below the break.
Uhm... it's Dutch, not Belgian.
Although I'll grant you the two countries regularly mix cast- and crewmembers.
This was hugely successful in The Netherlands, it was basically The Big Children's Movie this summer.
No sorcery though, it's stricktly swords in this one, a medieval adventure tale.
You sure? I thought Dutch at first, too, but it's not listed at the Dutch Film Institute and the IMDB lists it as Belgian.
I'll re-re-check. The production company might be listed as Belgian. Benelux is an abbreviation of Belgium-Netherlands-Luxemburg, and before we had the European Union these three countries had their own mercantile treaties up and running. Hence the confusion.
But the characters in the movie speak Dutch, not Flemish. And the director is Dutch.
And IMDB lists the movie as Dutch, though it was shot on location in Belgium due to a combination of tax benefits and the fact that our Southern neighbors have nicer forests...