Eldorado is a 2008 Belgian absurdist road tragicomedy film directed by Bouli Lanners and selected for the Directorsâ Fortnight (40th anniversary) 61st Cannes Film Festival 2008. The film received the André Cavens Award for Best Film by the Belgian Film Critics Association (UCC). It was the official entry from Belgium for the 81st Academy Awards, but was not chosen as one of the films to be nominated during the ceremony.
It was filmed in Wallonia.
It had the working title California Carwash and was based on an incident from Lanners's past.
Yvan (Bouli Lanners), a used car salesman, comes home late one evening to his house in the Belgian countryside. He discovers that a burglar (Fabrice) has just broken into his house and is hiding under his bed. When the burglar tries to escape, Yvan knocks him over by throwing a metal pipe at him. Upon confronting him, he discovers that the burglar is a young man in need of money to fuel his drug addiction. Yvan decides to help this young man, who says his names is Elie, by not turning him over to the police and by giving him a little money for the road. Finally, out of pity and remembering his own brother who had died of an overdose, Yvan decides to drive Elie, at his request, to the home of his parents in southern Belgium. Thus begins a journey across Wallonia, on which they face unsettling encounters with random people and humorous situations.
Eldorado is a burlesque and melancholic road movie in the tradition of the absurd and Belgian surrealism, which depicts (Bouli Lanners was a painter before making films), through saturated colors, CinemaScope format images, a modern western using many lateral tracking shots and situational gags depicting an intense relationship between two men lost in their respective lives and doomed to an inevitably dark end.
Belgian Film Critics Association (UCC)
Gijón International Film Festival