Kiss Me Softly

In a small Flemish town, seventeen-year-old Jasper drifts through a life that offers him very little room. His father is a local singer and the center of attention wherever he goes, and Jasper's own feelings, including a sexuality he cannot name at home, go largely unnoticed. Then a friend kisses him, unexpectedly, and the dull surface of his days cracks open. The kiss gives Jasper the courage to accept who he is; the harder task is getting his self-absorbed father to see him at all. Anthony Schatteman wrote and directed this sixteen-minute Belgian short as a deeply personal project, one he shared with his own father before filming. Ezra Fieremans leads the cast, with Marijke Pinoy and Marc Van eeghem. Selected for Frameline in San Francisco, the film later inspired a sequel, Follow Me, and it appears on Here TV as part of The Gay Agenda 28.