Young Hearts poster

Young Hearts

2024 · Anthony Schatteman

For a cozy night in when you want to remember what a first crush felt like — the good cry here is a soft one. Comfort viewing with a real emotional pulse.

What it's about

Elias is fourteen, with a loving family, a girlfriend by default, and a Flemish village that fits him like someone else's coat. Then Alexander moves in next door, and their instant friendship carries a charge Elias has no name for yet. Over one summer of bike rides and backyard hours, he has to figure out what he feels and whether he can say it out loud — at home, at school, and to Alexander himself.

The experience

Gentle, sun-warmed, and openhearted, with the low hum of adolescent anxiety underneath. It's a film that trusts tenderness — you spend it half-smiling with your chest slightly tight.

Performances

Lou Goossens is astonishingly transparent as Elias — a face on which every unspoken feeling is legible, carrying the film with almost no armor.

The craft

Anthony Schatteman's debut runs on unforced naturalism: summer light, bicycles cresting country roads, and a schlager-singing father whose sentimental pop hits shadow his son's very unsentimental feelings. Nothing showy — the craft is in how effortless it all looks.

Why it matters

Premiering in the Berlinale's Generation strand, it stood out in the queer coming-of-age wave for refusing tragedy — betting that tenderness alone can sustain a film — and announced Schatteman as a director to watch.

Fourteen-year-old Elias has a loving family, a girlfriend by default, and a Flemish village that fits him like someone else's coat; then Alexander moves in next door, and a friendship arrives carrying a charge Elias has no name for yet. Anthony Schatteman's debut feature, premiered in the Berlinale's Generation strand, was inevitably measured against his countryman Lukas Dhont's Close — but where Dhont steers boyhood intimacy toward grief, Schatteman commits to something rarer and, in its way, riskier: a queer coming-of-age story that trusts tenderness to sustain a whole film. The craft is unforced naturalism — summer light, bicycles cresting country roads, a schlager-singing father whose sentimental hits shadow his son's very unsentimental feelings — anchored by Lou Goossens's astonishingly transparent lead performance, a face on which every flicker of panic and hope is legible. Word of mouth carried it far beyond the festival circuit, embraced as the gentle first-love film a generation of viewers wished they'd had at fourteen. Its best moments need no dialogue at all: two boys, one look, held a beat longer than is safe.

Reception

Premiered quietly in Berlinale 2024's Generation Kplus (kids' jury gave it a Crystal Bear special mention), then snowballed through a year of festival audience awards and streaming word-of-mouth into a genuine Letterboxd darling — a rare 'small European debut' that found its people.

How Young Hearts was received, from release to now →

Influences: the films it descends from and the films it influenced

  • Close (2022) — The named model: Dhont's method of casting two untrained boys for emotional transparency and directing them into unguarded physical closeness against a flat rural Flemish landscape is exactly the register Schatteman adopts.
  • Girl (2018) — Establishes the Dhont grammar Young Hearts inherits — a shallow-focus camera held tight on an adolescent body in natural light, letting the face rather than dialogue carry the interior state.
  • Rosetta (1999) — The Belgian handheld, following-camera naturalism and nonprofessional-feel performance that all subsequent Flemish social realism (Dhont included) builds from.
  • The 400 Blows (1959) — Founds the whole mode of adolescent naturalism resting on an untrained boy's transparent face and location shooting rather than a scripted arc.
  • Water Lilies (2007) — Renders teenage sexual awakening through wordless bodily gesture and observational natural light, refusing adult narration or moralizing — Schatteman's 'wordless-moments' craft.
  • Tomboy (2011) — Shows childhood queerness in a warm naturalist key with a handheld camera at child's-eye level and a nonprofessional lead, modeling tenderness-over-tragedy.
  • Call Me By Your Name (2017) — Sun-drenched available-light cinematography and a languid summer temporality in which desire is told through glances, proximity and diegetic pop rather than declaration.
  • Beautiful Thing (1996) — The template for working-class gay teen first-love that resolves in tenderness, using diegetic pop (Mama Cass) as emotional scaffolding — a direct precedent for the schlager soundtrack device.
  • Weekend (2011) — Low-key queer romance built from natural light and improvisational, near-documentary transparency between two leads, prioritizing intimacy over plot.
  • North Sea Texas (2011) — The specific Flemish precedent — provincial Belgian queer coming-of-age and first love rendered in tender, aestheticized naturalism, the tradition Young Hearts extends.
  • God's Own Country (2017) — Rural queer belonging where emotion is carried in wordless physical labor and weather-lit landscape, the feeling withheld from speech and given to the body.
  • Jongens (Boys) (2014) — Low-Countries teen-boy first love told through summer sport and sun, structured explicitly to land on tenderness rather than the bury-your-gays ending.
  • The Way He Looks (2014) — Adolescent queer romance staged in a warm, unthreatening world that deliberately refuses the tragedy template — the same 'tenderness-over-tragedy' authorial choice.
  • Summer of 85 (2020) — Seaside teenage first infatuation scored to diegetic period pop, using a specific era's music as the affective engine of the romance the way schlager works here.
  • Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013) — Handheld naturalist close-ups on a young lead's transparent face through sexual awakening, with available light and sensory realism carrying the emotional charge.
  • Lie With Me (2022) — Rural provincial first love shadowed by closeted shame and the pull of belonging to a small hometown, the same countryside-and-secrecy staging as Young Hearts.

Similar films

All the films related to Young Hearts →

Watch it with: curated runs of related films

  • The Unspoken Between Boys — Watch these together for the way each lets a boyhood friendship curdle into longing, grief, or something neither kid can quite name.