Dust Review – A Timely Fiction of the Dot-com Bankruptcy That Hit Rural Belgium | film

TThe crisis faced by two middle-aged Belgian tech bros in the 1990s might be better suited to a European TV drama – perhaps with the two leads’ travails confined to the first episode, setting up a longer intergenerational drama that takes us into the present. And yet, here it is: a Berlin-competition feature film from screenwriter Angelo Tiesens and director Anke Blondy, exquisitely produced and photographed and impeccably acted. But he’s also strangely narrow-minded, leaving you with the feeling that he hasn’t gone beyond his immediate concerns; It’s not clear why exactly we need a fictional crisis from the 1990s inspired by a real financial fraud scandal.

Well, maybe the point is small and sad: a pathetic tale of the first, almost forgotten, dot-com crash that holds a harbinger of our AI-obsessed present. Aryeh Worthalter and Jan Hamenecker play Gert and Luc, two bald men who in the late 1990s are technological innovators in Belgium. Their startup went public and made them very wealthy, and all their local friends, families, and companies poured every cent of their savings into stocks. Gert and Luke are now preparing to turn the clay of Flanders into European Silicon Valley.

There’s some hilarious comedy as the two host a dynamic company presentation, unveiling what in 2026 looks like hilariously ancient voice-to-text hardware. Steve Jobs These guys are not. But in the audience is investigative journalist Aaron (Anthony Welsh), who confronts them with the shocking truth: for years they have been fabricating profits to boost their stock prices, secure lucrative government grants, and, on an unconscious level, bolster their own ridiculous egos. His story will be exposed on Monday, leaving them and their investors bankrupt, and Gert and Luke facing prison time.

The film follows the clamor of an empty Sunday before the police arrive, as they scramble individually for a way out, burning and shredding reams of documents, with Locke suspecting that Gert will sell him down the river. They both have secret stashes of cash. Gert, a gay man, is in a casual relationship with his co-driver Kenneth (Thibaud Domes) who, however, has no place in Gert’s new scheme: same-day travel to a South American country without extradition arrangements with Belgium. Gert pays one last visit to his sister, who runs a bakery, not knowing that she will face ruin due to her investment in his worthless company, but he cannot warn her against selling for fear of providing evidence of insider trading.

Luke has a family: a father in a nursing home who pays him a final, poignant visit to ask if the old man is “proud of him,” as well as a wife who tolerates him and an estranged adult daughter who does not. His final emotional breakdown comes when his BMW gets bogged down in a muddy field and he staggers in the rain, staring at a few cows staring back uncuriously. Is this the harsh, unglamorous truth? His dreams of a bright future here are mocked by the reality of an economy that for centuries was only suitable for agriculture? Do these cows embody a primitive innocence that he only sees now?

The “dust” in the title is the dust into which all these vain dreams of riches will collapse. Perhaps the “mud” served as well.