Michael Bijnens

Meet a young and fearless up-and-coming Belgian talent! Michael Bijnens completed his studies in directing at the RITS in Brussels last year. During his training he followed a path that led him through writing and film to theatre. He uses his own fiction to portray the often harsh and unforgiving reality around him. And sees it as his responsibility to narrate stories that are not told often enough. Bijnens is a constant observer and as a writer and theatre-maker focuses on what is going wrong in this world.  

For his final-year production he went to Juarez in Mexico, where a violent war between drug cartels, police and army raged between 2006 and 2011. Over a period of five years more than eleven thousand people lost their lives and Juárez became a ghost town. In this illustrious epicentre of Mexico, in the middle of the drug violence on the border with the United States, there is a local saying: ‘This is a city of God, but only because the devil does not dare to come here.’ For five months Bijnens travelled through this border region and met cowboys, dealers, DEA agents and an evangelical priest who is head of a psychiatric institution. During the last few weeks of his trip, he retreated to a hotel room in the city of El Paso. There he wrote an amazing detective story about a series of murders whose victims were patients at the psychiatric institution in the middle of the desert. The result is ‘La Linea’.