MARIEKE
MARIEKE

Marieke, Marieke is a French-language Belgian–German drama feature written and directed by Sophie Schoukens. Set in Brussels and told with a close, restrained style, the film follows a young woman who tries to keep her life functional while quietly running on habits that are breaking her from the inside.

What kind of film is it?

This is not a “plot-first” movie. It is a character-driven European drama built around behaviour, silence, and consequence. The camera stays near faces and small spaces, not to decorate the story, but to increase pressure. The film avoids easy explanations: it shows choices before it explains them, and it treats discomfort as part of the truth rather than something to smooth out.

If you’re looking for a clean genre label, “drama” is correct, but too small. The film also works as a psychological coming-of-age story, where growing up is not a celebration but a confrontation: the moment you understand that coping is not the same thing as living.

Synopsis

Marieke is 20 and lives with her mother, Jeanne. By day she works at a chocolate factory in Brussels, holding onto routine because routine doesn’t ask questions. By night she searches for warmth in relationships with much older men. It is not a glamorous double life; it is a strategy. With older men she can feel protected, briefly valued, briefly safe-without the risk of being truly seen.

The fragile balance changes when Jacoby arrives. He is a book editor living abroad, and he is looking for Marieke’s late father’s final manuscript. What sounds like a professional request becomes a threat to the family’s silence. Jeanne tries to keep Jacoby away, insisting the past should remain closed. Marieke refuses the boundary, and the search for a manuscript becomes a search for the truth: about her father, about her mother, and about the patterns Marieke uses to avoid grief.

Core credits

For catalogue entries, festival programme notes, and film databases, these are the essentials most people verify first:

• Year: 2010
• Countries: Belgium / Germany
• Runtime: 85 minutes
• Original language: French
• Written & directed by: Sophie Schoukens

Principal cast

The film’s impact depends on performance and tension rather than spectacle. The principal cast commonly listed in public catalogues includes:

• Hande Kodja - Marieke
• Jan Decleir - Jacoby
• Barbara Sarafian - Jeanne
• Caroline Berliner - Anna

Why people keep searching for “Marieke, Marieke”

Most visitors arrive for one of three reasons: they saw the film at a screening and want the credits, they heard about it through a festival programme, or they are looking for a short, accurate synopsis. The title is often searched together with the director’s name (Sophie Schoukens) and the lead actors (Hande Kodja, Jan Decleir), because those are the clean identifiers that help differentiate this film from unrelated results.

If you decide to watch it, go in expecting realism and restraint: a story where the city feels lived-in, the relationships feel complicated, and the emotional turning points come from small decisions that finally become impossible to ignore.