Biography
Etienne Verhaegen chose to live a life crammed with magical moments. He was granted a long rite-of-passage: forty years filming on the razor's edge. French magazine ELLE dubbed him and his first wife "les aventuriers de la pellicule" (the adventurers of film). His films have won over 20 awards at festivals to date.
Etienne was two years old when a V2 missile, deployed over his native city of Malines in Belgium by Hitler's Nazi troops, blew up the house next to his. Glass from the windowpanes in his bedroom tore his cradle to bits. He dodged this meeting with the dictator: that morning he had been taken out for a stroll. Since then, he has always had a lucky star shining overhead. He would encounter half a dozen other dictators throughout his life.
At thirteen, his mother, an artist, lent him her 16mm camera. From that moment on, handling a camera was second nature... Nevertheless, his father, a doctor and a poet, made it clear that he had to graduate from university to enhance his self-confidence.
After receiving a BA in Political Science and a BA and an MA in Economics from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, he began studying film at Stanford University, then at UCLA (California) and later at CalArts. Meetings with Louis Malle, Roger Vadim and Samuel Fuller were key moments during this time. Training in Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio method, and studies at the American Film Institute, completed his directing qualifications. 20 years later Etienne would teach this method in his own workshops.
At the end of the sixties, the cultural explosion in California turned his world upside-down, developed his creativity and whet his appetite for exploring every possibility and every aspect of Mankind. An encounter with the beatnik Allen Ginsberg, who featured in his film "Adventure in Hippyland", and with spiritual Masters such as Krishnamurti and Deshimaru, contributed to his hunger for knowledge and inner exploration.
His mentor, ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, inspired him to become totally financially independent and to work with small and polyvalent crews.
In war-torn Bangladesh, encounters with Mother Theresa taught him lessons in humility and compassion.
Etienne started to put his camera not only to the service of broadening awareness, but also exposing injustice, exploitation and revolts in the third world.
During two months in Cuba, he planted coffee and met Fidel Castro. This experience roused his interest in Latin American revolutions, while at the same time he distanced himself from all forms of political authority.
During the 70s, he felt strongly about the heavy-handedness with which the military were repressing Latin America. His film "Militaries of the Americas" depicting schools in Panama where the CIA was training dictators was shown at the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America.
In his film "Revolt of the Red Ponchos" he gave voice to oppressed rebel Indians at an altitude of 4,000 metres in the Andes. They agreed to act out the role they had played in their conflict with their landlords and the military, in the form of a psychodrama.
A few years later, Etienne dissected dominant figures (African kings, sultans, sheiks, Latin American dictators, Papua big men, oriental aristocrats, etc.) by filming how they theatrically demonstrate their authority, and especially by filming the paradox of their power in his collection of 12 episodes entitled "The Hidden Worlds of Power", produced by Frédéric Rossif. He helped to make foreign cultures more comprehensible to his audience.
During this decade, he shared intimate moments with forgotten people in little-explored corners of the earth. They were setting the scene for his future fictional screenplays.
Etienne was continuously living on the razor's edge during these shoots: crossing parts of New Guinea amidst warring tribes, filming in harems in the Yemen or Bihari concentration camps in Bangladesh, or being present at the destruction by vandals of an ancient Nepalese city, Bhaktapur.
The most fascinating experience happened in Haiti while filming his first wife Patricia Scraeyen's Voodoo initiation ceremony, a long, secret and tedious process ("Voodoo, the Terror of Night"). The ceremonies, possessions and trances made an impression on him. This integration facilitated filming the "Sans Poils" sect fifteen years later. This sect terrorises the local villagers when they dance with coffins then fill them with their adversaries. The experience allowed Etienne and his wife Patricia to reveal the mystery of the zombies, and how they are fabricated. When the "Sans Poils" emperor invited them to join the sect, they declined and brought their experience to a close.
The most unbearable experience was filming the genital mutilation of young Sudanese girls ("The Secret of their Body") in order to denounce this torturous act but also to understand the reason behind it. The film contributed to some African governments implementing banning laws on female circumcision (Kenya, Sudan and Senegal).
The most traumatic experience was being shot at by the Salvadorian dictator's henchmen during the filming of an appalling massacre ("Salvador, the Rule of Terror"). Bullets whistled past his camera. The wounded were writing on the Cathedral walls in their own blood, "Revolution or Death".
Shattered after ten years filming people being battered, humiliated, tortured and massacred, Etienne Verhaegen started looking for greener pastures, far from human conflicts.
The greener pastures turned out to be the ocean blue. He organised a two-month maritime expedition, inviting Captain Cousteau's head diver, Bernard Delemotte, to take the breath-holding champion Jacques Mayol and a blind osteopath to caress whales in the ocean depths ("Riding on the Grey Whales"). He also took two kids with him and filmed their changes in behaviour after being in contact with dolphins and whales for long periods ("A Cruise with Wales and Dolphins").
With his new partner and now wife, Mina Pi, and for the next two decades, Etienne started making fictional stories in a documentary style about real young people who share emotional relationships with the wild animals they were raised with. The films ("Born Among Wild Animals") achieved high television viewing figures around the world.
Starting in the year 2000, he began filming the relationships between animals 'in close contact' and those with no human intervention, in the sea and on land. His hands-on approach led to him being wounded by a rhinoceros, a lion, a leopard, a puma, baboons, a whale...
He learnt how to remain calm when a tiger shark swam straight for him, but when a charging herd of elephants miraculously stopped one metre in front of him, he saw this as a sign that he had to stop living on the edge.
Since 2011, having had his fill of adventures and emotions, he has devoted his time to developing his feature-length, fictional screenplays, which have already won many awards at the International Film Festival in Houston in the United States. They all have one thing in common: stories of adventurous couples.
Today, between his writing, directing and production activities, Etienne spends his time designing and building Buddhist and Hindu temples, exotic gardens, singing opera and dancing Butoh.
