Here review – romantic connection in the forest in gentle

Lives change course after a chance encounter between a construction worker and an academic in Bas Devos’s microscopically detailed gem of a film

Belgian director Bas Devos’s gentle, delicate and quietly beguiling movie, a prize winner last year in Berlin, is about love and fate. It crept up on me at its own measured walking pace – and it incidentally has the best and cleverest last line of any film I have seen this year.

Stefan (Stefan Gota) is a Romanian construction worker in Brussels who is preparing to go back home for a summer holiday, but isn’t at all sure how long he’ll stay or if he’ll ever come back. He wanders around handing out plastic containers of his homemade soup as farewell gifts to the friends he’s made around the place. Meanwhile, Shuxiu is a Chinese grad student in bryology working on a doctoral thesis on mosses and working part-time in her aunt’s takeaway restaurant (she is played by Liyo Gong, an actor and editor who worked on Youth, Wang Bing’s epic documentary about transient workers in the Zhejiang province).