"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fant

I always feel strange having to introduce myself, as I would presume I’m a bit biased, but for you I’ll make an honest attempt at objectivity…

Marie Olaerts (being ‘me’ in the third person) grew up in a small village in a small country with a great liking for action movies, SF and thriller/ suspense, dreaming of how it would be like to be on a set, not visiting, but actually doing something useful. And so, that dream in the back of her mind she ended up at the Rits, a Belgian school for film making, where she graduated in 2007 as a professional bachelor (option camera/ cinematography) with the short film ‘the blessing of Henry Mullin’ as cinematographer.

Ever since then she is working on different sets in different functions, but her true passion lies with cinematography. There is still so much to learn and try, enough to fill a lifetime she is happy to discover, and her vision altered by a film-focussed life and the things she saw; she loves the light that seems just a bit off to add to the scene.

Meeting new people and education opened her horizon to a much greater rage of films, especially the Asian cinema, of which ‘Hero’ is her favourite. Though she hasn’t had the chance to see as much films as she’d like, she’s striving to correct that in the near future.

Movies she holds in high regard are: Hero, Alien, The Crow, Darkness (for the mood of the film), Musa, The game, The usual suspects, Bin Jip, Old Boy … The documentaries ‘Long Gone’ (http://www.longgonefilm.com/) and ‘Peuple Migrateur’ opened her eyes to the fact that this genre too can be beautiful to make and film-like to watch and Monty Python was like rediscovering the comedy genre all over again. Nothing beats ‘The Holy Grail’.

Always having lived in the middle of nowhere; contact with nature is a necessity more then anything else and when she’s not on set she likes to roam forests, meet with friends and go to class (she’s been following Aikido since November 2007 and this has become a bit of a passion). Other then that, she likes to make photographs, read, draw and write.

… There’s not much more to say really. Hello world, this is me ;)

-- Light is only meaningful in relation to darkness and it is the infinite play of these two opposites, where and how they meet and their relation to a certain moment in time that I seek, not to perfect, but to rediscover...