Wannes Destoop’s debut feature Holy Rosita won Best Film at the Torino Film Festival, and the Belgian director opens the conversation by explaining the thread that runs through everything he’s made.
It’s important to open up your horizon and just try to see much further than what you know.
The Filmmaker as Misfit
Destoop has always gravitated to society’s outsiders, and he suspects it’s because he was one: one of seven children fighting for attention, the kid who felt like the odd one out. His documentary work in film school, which he cheerfully calls a bit crappy in hindsight, was already a string of portraits of misfits, though it took him another decade to understand why those were the only stories he wanted to tell. He carried it into his breakthrough television series Albatros, a tragicomic drama about people at a weight-loss camp that won the Prix Europa and sold to PBS, where the whole point was to look past the bodies to the human beings inside them.
Rosita’s Story
Holy Rosita centers on Rosita, played by theater actor Daphne Agten in her first film lead, a cheerful, helpful woman who works as a steward at her city’s football club and lives alone in a social housing flat. Rosita has an intellectual disability, and her deep desire to have a child strikes the people around her, chiefly her guardian-mother figure, as irresponsible, since she can barely take care of herself. When Rosita becomes pregnant, she keeps it a secret. Destoop and his co-writers, Janne Desmet and Tom Dupont, poured their own lives into it: Dupont is a father, while Destoop and Desmet share the longing to become parents and the knowledge that it isn’t simple, and that longing became Rosita’s.
The film stakes itself on a question Destoop genuinely won’t answer.
Can you take care of a child if it’s sometimes hard to take care of yourself?
He’s careful to note there’s no single right answer. A child in a materially perfect home with absent, exhausted parents may have less than a child who is simply loved, and the film exists to open that debate rather than settle it. The antagonist, Rosita’s surrogate mother, isn’t a villain so much as someone speaking from what she knows, which, Destoop points out, isn’t much, since she isn’t a mother herself.
Color as an Argument
Here’s the stance the film quietly makes, and it lives in the look. On the page, Holy Rosita could read as a gray social drama, what Destoop calls misery porn, and he refused that at every turn. Rosita’s flat isn’t a squalid box of beer cans and pizza boxes; it’s full of sun, saturated wardrobe, a red streak in a child’s hair, a bright blue jacket, a yellow top.
His explicit model was Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, which shoots real hardship through the candy-colored beauty of a purple motel near Disney World and never once asks you to pity its characters. That refusal is the argument. The misery-porn aesthetic, gray light and squalor, is itself a kind of judgment, a way of agreeing in advance that a life is lesser; Destoop’s color is a way of disagreeing, insisting on Rosita’s full, vivid humanity before a single plot point arrives. It’s the same dignity the Dardenne brothers grant their working-class heroes in films like Rosetta, and the warmth The Peanut Butter Falcon extends to a protagonist with a disability claiming his own life rather than waiting to be pitied. And the structural choice reinforces it: Rosita is in every single scene, so the audience stands beside her rather than studying her from the safe distance of a case study. You can’t reduce someone to a container, Destoop’s documentary eye taught him, once you’ve spent ninety minutes inside their point of view. Which is finally why the central question stays open. The moment you’re certain you know who’s fit to be a parent, you’ve become the surrogate mother, the one who “knows” what’s best for a person she’s refused to actually see.
The other film Destoop keeps close is Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, which he loves for the way it lets you laugh and cry in the same breath, the crime, the tragedy, and the comedy braided together. He has a personal stake in it too: years ago he worked on the production as an assistant to the location manager, charged with the memorable duty of stopping passersby from photographing Colin Farrell. That blend of tones is his ideal, and it’s why Holy Rosita dares to find humor and warmth inside a hard story rather than drowning it in solemnity.
Building a Real Person
Everything in the production served that authenticity. Because Rosita anchors every scene, casting her terrified Destoop; he spent a full year auditioning, treating the search as a way to discover who Rosita even was, and emerged certain that Agten was the only possible choice, even though his very first instinct had pointed there before he trusted it. The six-year-old who plays Rosita’s best friend came not from an agency but from a phone video of a co-writer’s niece at a family party, a child with no interest in acting, exactly the kind of unguarded presence Destoop wanted. To protect that looseness, he reorganized the whole shoot: with the budget covering only twenty-four days against the Belgian norm of thirty, he cut the grip department and the script supervisor and shot in natural light, which bought him more days to improvise, especially with the children, whom he never let memorize lines, instead nudging them mid-take and catching whatever chaos erupted. His mantra, lifted from Haneke, is that the day he’s fully happy with a film he’s made, he should quit, because then he can’t do any better.
The Win, and the Climb Ahead
Destoop didn’t make the film to win prizes, but he’s clear-eyed that they matter, because an award is social currency that buys a small film reach. He first turned heads in 2011 when his graduation short took the Jury Prize at Cannes, a break he believes shaped his entire path, and at Torino the validation came in slow motion: flown back at the last minute, sitting through an awards ceremony as, prize by prize, the bigger ones were called and his film wasn’t, until only Best Film remained. He still treasures the selfie with Billy Zane, who’d come to play Marlon Brando in a festival film and who called Destoop the winner of the evening before the announcement. The harder truth is what comes next. As of the conversation Holy Rosita had no sales agent or distributor beyond the Benelux, and Destoop was hunting for a North American premiere and a path to cinemas worldwide, candid about a brutal market where his film was pulled from Belgian theaters after three weeks to make room for a bigger title, because the money keeps the lights on. His advice to younger filmmakers is the oldest cliche there is, never give up, and he means it precisely because the work is a long sequence of nos delivered to something you wrote with your heart on the page. The only way through is to keep expanding your horizon, and to keep standing with the misfits.
