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ABOVE US ALL

Drama - Completed 2014

After the death of her Indigenous mother, the eleven year old Shay is taken by her Flemish father from Australia to Ypres, Belgium. In the surroundings, full of traces of the Great War, Shay tries to understand her mother’s death.

- Year of production
- 2014
- Genres
- Drama
- Countries
- NETHERLANDS
- Languages
- DUTCH
- Budget
- 1 - 3 M$
- Synopsis
- Shay is an eleven-year- old girl growing up with an Indigenous Australian mother and a father who is a Flemish astronomer. He is researcher at an Australian Astronomical Observatory. After his wifes death, he decides to return to Ypres (Belgium) for a time-out, taking his two children with him.
  
  ABOVE US ALL tells the story of an amputated family that becomes uprooted after moving to a new world. This world seems to be held captive by it’s own past. Hundred years after the outbreak of the war, Ypres still struggles with the question which story of that collective traumatic event is the most relevant. There is this collective remembrance and there is this very personal mourning about someone you loved so much. “Does every star have a name?” Shay asks her father. He refutes that there are way too many stars. “What do you have to be, or what do you have to do to get a name?” is her next question. She is told by her grandfather that her mother is now somewhere at the sky camp in the vast and boundless space above, where her father envisions an endlessly expanding universe with new physical discoveries.
  “It’s impossible to forget someone you really loved,” concludes Shay, who stubbornly refuses to budge. Her father believes otherwise. “You have to move on, there is no choice, the world drags you along. ”Each star travels its own way across the universe. Especially in times of grief.