Koen van Sande

After successfully finishing his studies as a film director at the H.R.I.T.S. in Brussels in 1998 with the award winning short WES, Koen Van Sande focussed on a postgraduate in screenwriting. When returning from a writing workshop at Columbia University, New York, he started working as a freelance director for Belgian television.

In 2005 Kanakna engaged him to direct and write fiction series such as « 16+ » and « De Vijfhoek ».
In 2013 Koen started focussing more on fiction and directs a few well received short films. In 2017, his fifth short film « Lockdown » gets funded by VAF and ran festivals in 2019. 2018 starts with a new prime time fiction series called « Phil Frisco », produced by his own company Cartouche for VTM.

In September 2019, Koen gets funded for the script of his first feature film CLEAN.

Koen is writer and director.

Clean

LIM | Less is More 2019

CLEAN is an intimate author film with a wide impact. Not another expensive action driven police film or drug story. This film is about the inner battle of the protagonist, about the human tragedy behind a family confronted with a drug addict family member. Where do you draw the line as a brother, sister, father or mother? And what line will you draw? There is fear and doubt, there is the almost compulsive urge to care. After all it is family. But at the same time there is aversion, disapproval.

The hesitation that family members of drugs- users experience to talk about it openly, makes the damage even greater than it already is.

By embedding these hypocrite, moral and ideologic issues in an average middle-class family and showing the deep human destruction that these cause, the audience is taken out of its comfort zone and forced to think about the inhumane and absurdity of choices that are made, based on tragic misunderstandings about drug addiction.