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Belgian director Nicolas Keppens loves the infinite possibilities offered by animation. “You can really dive deep into the world and create all these details,” he says. “I like making things by hand, and the short format seems close to me to the stories we tell each other each day. To me, a good night with friends is a night where everybody shares some slices of life, each with the potential of a short story.”
Keppens’ latest stop-motion animated short Beautiful Men follows three bald brothers who travel to Turkey to get hair transplants. The artist, who won the Jury Prize at Annecy in 2021 for his short Easter Eggs, began work on the project in 2019 when he was a resident at l’Abbaye de Fontevraud in France. “A few months later, we had to go in lockdown, which gave me the possibility to work further on the script and finish Easter Eggs at the same time, as I couldn’t do my day job remotely. We finished the film the spring of 2023 after six months of animation.”
The idea for Beautiful Men came to him when he was visiting Istanbul a few years ago for work. “The first morning, while having breakfast in the hotel, the room was filled with bald men who were waiting for their transplant,” Keppens recalls. “Few of them already got the treatment, which is quite a gruesome thing to see. Their heads were all bloody. In a way, it was quite a tender sight to see: These insecure men eating their yogurt in silence as they waited for a cure!”
According to the director, the short’s puppets are handcrafted silicone dolls, and all the backgrounds are made of wood. “On set, we had three animators, a coordinator, an assistant and the director of photography,” he points out. “And then, of course, all people from production, sound design, the composer and the company who made the marionettes. I was so grateful that I could make a stop-motion film. It was a dream come true, so I tried to see it as a game and think of it as playing, day in and day out. This made the time on set really fun. However, the moments in my workshop as I prepared all the backgrounds were a bit lonesome.”
‘Our sets would literally come to life by adding light, choosing the right angle and finally seeing the puppets move. It’s a whole other way of working than drawing!’
— Director Nicolas Keppens
While citing Mike Judge and Masaaki Yuasa as two of his animation idols, he also mentions such independent animation artists as Kirsten Lepore, Flóra Anna Buda, Hugo Covarrubias and Joseph Bennett as sources of inspiration.
Looking back, Keppens describes his first stop-motion experience as a “very pleasant journey.” “I was very happy with the environment,” he says. “It’s a whole other way of working than drawing. Our sets would literally come to life by adding light, choosing the right angle and finally seeing the puppets move.”
The filmmaker hopes that festival audiences will find the characters featured in Beautiful Men as “human, touching and insecure.” He adds, “I hope they experience a moment with them, just as we experience a moment with our friends as they are sharing these slices of life with us. I like making films in a way that feels good and playful to me and hope our short has small place in the animation landscape.”
For more info, visit nicolaskeppens.com. Beautiful Men is available to rent or buy on Vimeo through Miyu Distribution.
