Living Apartment Together

This new film project on location by Yves Degryse, artistic director at BERLIN and brand-new co-artistic director NTGent, ingeniously tells the extraordinary lives of the residents of an apartment block.

Know thy neighbour… Living Apartment Together is set at twilight in the city. A group of spectators in headphones watch the side wall of an apartment block in fascination. In six apartments, tableaux unfurl through a video projection that highlight the poignant beauty of our everyday existence. Some residents know the depths of each other’s souls or listen at random through the flimsy walls that separate them to the minor and major dramas playing out among the neighbours. Others merely give a polite nod when they pass each other on the stairs.

As if by magic, the outer wall of an apartment block opens like a tin of sardines, so we see what is going on in the different apartments. The headphones put you momentarily in the midst of things, with the sense that you are eavesdropping from afar as the life of the city whirls around you. Don’t be surprised if the apartment residents suddenly step out of the projection to watch themselves live from a distance or strike up a conversation with each other in the middle of the street.

Living Apartment Together is inspired by Georges Perec’s fascinating novel Life, A User’s Manual. Degryse interviewed people with an unusual story in different cities as a basis for the script. He developed these stories into screenplays for the different apartments, in partnership with Angelo Tijssens who has worked as a screenwriter on films including Girl and Close by Lukas Dhont. Living Apartment Together is about turning points, invisible synchronicity and the realisation that every beginning is nothing more than a sequel.

a production by Yves Degryse/BERLIN & NTGent