In Eldorado, his second feature film as a director, he plays the lead. In 1999, he wrote and directed Travellinckx, a short road movie in black and white super 8, which did a world tour of film festivals. Two years later, the short film Muno confirmed his unusual style and was selected for the Directors Fortnight at Cannes and many other festivals. In 2005, he made his first feature film, Ultranova, a tender and ironic portrait of a group of misfits and a quirky look at his native Wallonia, which was awarded a prize at the Berlinale. He is currently writing his next two feature films.

In “Eldorado,” a road movie that poignantly juggles absurdism and melancholy, the summertime landscape of the Wallonia region of Belgium is filmed to resemble a miniaturized American West. The soundtrack for this story of two mutually suspicious strangers who establish a tentative bond on a highway to nowhere echoes the twang of Ennio Morricone with a hint of parody.

The unsettled weather — billowing clouds give way to thunderstorms before the sun returns, only to disappear again — reflects the movie’s tempestuous emotional climate and lends “Eldorado” a cosmic dimension. The camera is continually pulling back to photograph characters moving in the distance in settings that are as beautiful as they are desolate.

Excerpt from Stephen Holden at the  NY Times located HERE

About the Director
Bouli Lanners was born in Belgium in 1965. A self-taught painter, he worked at every possible job on shoots for Belgian television before making himself popular on Canal+ Belgium, by acting in sketches on Snuls, a comedy show created in 1989. Since then, he has directed films and played many supporting roles in Belgian and French productions, including The Carriers are Waiting by Benoît Mariage, Aaltra by Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern, Bunker Paradise, Enfermés dehors by Albert Dupontel, When the Sea Rises by Yolande Moreau, A Very Long Engagement by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Cow-Boy by Benoît Mariage, Asterix at the Olympic Games, in which he plays the King of the Greeks, and I Always Wanted to be a Gangster by Samuel Benchetrit. We will soon see him in Où est la main de l'homme sans tête by the Malandrin brothers, and in Louise Michel by Delépine and Kervern.