Doel

In urban exploration guidebooks, Doel ranks high in the “ghost town” category. Caught between a nuclear plant and the industrial port of Antwerp, it is in fact going to make way for a new dock to accommodate more containers. A long-planned disappearance that has seen the closure of businesses, of the school and the church, and chased away the majority of inhabitants. Only around 20 inhabitants still refuse to leave the village given over to graffiti artists, fans of street racing, photographers, the inquisitive, Dutch tourists and other ravers. That is the paradox of this ghost town: you come across a lot of people there. Frederik Sølberg draws a portrait of this micro-society that continues to exist among ruined houses, sharing with us the suspended day-to-day of those who seem to have found a form of fragile balance, empty and full, in this non-place condemned to disappear, this interval of urban space. It is the interstices of freedom, these places and these moments that should not exist, that the film succeeds in making its own and invites us to share.