AMOEBA PICTURES

 

 

Amoeba Pictures is a Brussels-based independent production floor, established in 2017. Active in the field of fiction and documentary, special focus lies on short films, feature length movies, and online serial formats. From local projects to international co-productions, Amoeba Pictures offers a non-exclusive involvement in various stages of production (script to post) with a creative, alternative, collaborative approach toward filmmaking. 

 

In nature, Amoeba is a unicellular functioning organism able to alter shape and adapt, playing an important ecological role often beneficial to its environment. Thought to be the oldest form of life on earth, its linguistic genesis comes from the Greek word ἀμοιβή, meaning “change.”

 

Gert Verbeeck is a writer, director and producer, who earned his experience on films, TV series and documentaries. His film education was formed at LUCA School of Arts, Brussels, with emphasis on screenplay writing and directing fiction. More recently, in the field of documentary, an on-going collaboration with The Polish National Film School, Lodz, came to fruition. 

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BIO excerpt

 

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Gert was born in the same year that Peter Weir made three schoolgirls disappear in Australia during a Picnic at Hanging Rock, Andrzej Zulawski started filming On the Silver Globe in an unfit Polish landscape, Steven Spielberg kept American people out of summer waters, and Guido Hendrickx put Burned Bridges on the Belgian map.

 

Starting his audiovisual formation in 1997, Gert enrolled into Sint-Lukas School of Arts, where he found himself being appreciated for his prior knowledgable acquaintance with the works of Mike Leigh, Robert Altman and Ken Russell. During that period he made the student films 'Love Devours' and his 1999 graduation project '37', both experimental fiction drama shorts.

 

His higher film education followed in the year 2000, with his acceptance to the now reformed LUCA School of Arts, where he studied screenplay writing under Dorothée Van Den Berghe, learned filmmaking stories from Marc Didden and attended guest teacher classes by Erik Lamens and Fien Troch.

 

Obliged to discover different approaches towards fiction and documentary, alongside occasional immersions in the more experimental side of filmmaking, Gert delivered his 2001 graduation student short film 'Change' as a work of fledged fiction under the tutorship of Bie Boeykens.

By then he had already left his hometown for the city of Brussels, from where he made the transition to on-set work and editing room hours. The following years saw him alternating between television production companies and short film projects. Job departments included production design for Menuet Films, editing at Woestijnvis and locations for Studio A.

 

As an independent filmmaker, Gert's first works were in the field of documentary. In May 2006 his docu short film 'House of an Architect' was accepted as an official selection of Cinéma des Indépendants, a non-genre bound Brussels short film festival. In November 2010 his one-minute short 'De Bal en de Stok' earned an official Micromovie screening at the Kinofest International Digital Film Festival, Bucharest, Romania.

 

During 2010 Gert was invited by the reformed Royal Belgian Film Archive to coordinate live multi-cam registrations of guest sessions with screenwriter Jorge Semprún, actor John Malkovich and film archival restorer Noël Desmet. In turn, he invited Ghent-based filmmaker Alexander Decommere and photographer Barbara Peremans for collaboration.

That same year saw the short documentary 'Cinematek' come to fruition, with Gert producing, co-directing and editing a micro-budget piece of pioneer's work. As it turned out, 'Cinematek' was the first independently produced reportage shedding light on the renewed Cinematek to go viral, via Cutting Edge's online Belgian platform.

With British director Alex Cox and American actor Lance Henriksen he made the short documentaries 'Shoot If You Live' (2011) and 'Facts and Fiction in the Life of Mr. Henriksen' (2012). The former production accommodated by the 3rd Offscreen Film Festival, the latter by the 28th Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival. Irish producer Declan Lynch invited him to handle script consultant duties on the Ghent-based anthology film 'Follow: Tall Tales from a Small City' (2014), during which period Gert also wrote the first draft of his 'At The Pond' screenplay.

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Alongside occasional set involvements on other short films and music videos – 'GPS' (2015), 'Grave Pleasures' (2017) – Gert started developing 'At The Pond' as writer/director from shooting script to pre-production during 2016 and went on to serve as producer in 2017 on the 'ATP: Halcyon' shoot, a short film sequence preceding the events in the 'At The Pond' storyline. Subsequently, ATP's crowd funding campaign was prepared, launched and successfully completed during 2018 via the European-based Ulule platform. 'At The Pond' went into full production during 2019's third trimester. Principle photography was completed just before the worldwide pandemic outbreak. 

 

Currently residing in the city of Brussels, handling writer / director / producer duties under the Amoeba Pictures banner, Gert has been writing and developing an array of short and feature films. His registered film works in various stages include WIP titles such as 'ATP: Pendulum' (supernatural drama), 'Relacity' (ensemble drama), 'Wildflower' (crime drama) and 'Sub H' (underground horror).

 

Other feature length projects and their titles are non-disclosed.