“The Heart of Heritage” BY Nina Degraeve

2023 · color · BE · NL, FR / EN · 48’ · In competition

At the heart of Belgium’s Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (RICH), a team of passionate people are working to preserve Belgian heritage. Through the conservation and restoration of altered paintings and sculptures, fragile objects and religious buildings ravaged by recent floods, a rare and precious time is revealed.

THE DIRECTOR | NINA DEGRAEVE

After a documentary experience at RTE-NEWS Belfast, Nina Degraeve began film studies in Directing and Producing at HELB – Ilya Prigogine in Brussels, from which she graduated in 2017.

Passionate of Contemporary Art, she focused her first school documentary on Igor Tishin, the Belarusian painter. After that, she directed « Boris Lehman : portrait of the unfinished » dedicated to the Belgian filmmaker. During her last year in filmschool, she worked as a trainee production assistant at « Les Films du Fleuve» under the supervision of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

Her graduation piece, the film « Ray Richardson : Our side of the water » about the London artist has been selected and showcased in festivals around the world where it won 8 awards such as the Liverpool Film Festival, the Student Media Awards in Cardiff, the Fine Arts Film Festival in Los Angeles or the Asolo Art Film Festival. 

After her thesis on the work of director Andrej Zvyagintsev, Nina was invited to the Arvo Pärt Center in Estonia to lead the conference « Loveless » by Andrej Zvyagintsev – context in music and silence.

In 2023, she directed her first feature-length documentary entitled « The Heart of Heritage » on the Belgium’s Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (RICH), one of the most recognized Institutes in the world and above all a major centre for the protection of art in Belgium. The film has currently been selected for the Firenze Archeo Film Festival, Bath Archeo-Heritage Film Festival, SCAM France, Archaeology Channel, …

Her next film « Portrait of Desire » with Belgian visual artist Romina Remmo, is due to be shot in 2025.