17-year-old Kevin, sentenced for violent behavior, is just let out of prison. To start anew, he moves in with his aunt and her family and begins an apprenticeship at her store. Quickly he adapts to his new home and gets along well with his cousin Sammy, in his last year of high school. Through Sammy and his friends, Kevin meets John. Upon discovering John’s unbearable situation with his mother, Kevin feels the urge to help his new friend. One evening fate intervenes and questions of betrayal, trust and loyalty start to direct their daily lives more than ever.

At the centre of my story are young people. Teenagers who are about to turn 18. This age range has always intrigued me because these young people are in a transitional phase. That difficult moment in your life when you actually feel grown-up,but everybody treats you as a child. In my previous three films, the relationship between youth and adults was always strongly present. These films however, focused on young children and thereby the parent-child relation was less complex.

In Home, I want to explore the field of tension between two generations. How do adults go about their responsibilities towards teenagers and how do these young people try to find their way into adulthood themselves. In this community of two struggling generations, I looked for a storyline that centers on the themes of parental love, freedom, loyalty, betrayal and violence.

I don’t want to depict the young people as an apathetic, lost generation, but I do want to show that, with their confusing value system, it is difficult to correctly establish the fine line between right and wrong. The young people are looking for a meaningful set of morals and a place for themselves in an ever faster-paced and “smaller” world. I want to support this dynamic generation and try to depict it in a very human way. I want to show young people’s struggle to make sense of this world, and their difficult quest to find themselves and to become adults. The environment in which they grow up plays a key role in this quest. Every opportunity they get and every opinion they form is inextricably linked with the adults who surround them at that point in time, and who are assumed to support them and protect them. I don’t want to use this story to communicate how rotten the youth of today is, but to underscore how great the responsibility is that an adult bears in the development of a young person.

Fien Troch (Belgium, 1978) is a multiple-award-winning Flemish director. She graduated from the LUCA School of Arts in Brussels in 2000, where she also taught. She wrote and directed a number of short films that put her on the map. Her first feature film, Een ander zijn geluk (Someone Else's Happiness, 2005) deals with a community's response to a hit-and-run incident in which a child is killed. Three years later, Fien was selected to spend time at the Cannes Cinéfondation's Résidence du Festival, during which time she made her second feature film, the love drama Unspoken (2008), about the sudden disappearance of a little girl. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and was also shown at the San Sebastian and Ghent film festivals.
In 2011, she made her third feature film, Kid, the emotionally charged tale of a seven-year-old farmer's son, Kid. The film made the jury selections of film festivals around the world, and won the Eurimages Award for the most promising project, the prize for the best film and best soundtrack at the Aubagne International Film Festival, the jury prize at the Festival Paris Cinéma, a special mention at the film festival in Gent, and in 2013 it won the Magritte Award for the Best Flemish Co-production at the Magrittes du Cinéma. With her latest project, Fien raked in the awards even before the cameras had started rolling: at the end of 2015 she won the international ARTE France Cinéma prize for her script for the film HOME at the TorinoFilmLab.

Filmography:

2005 SOMEONE ELSE'S HAPPINESS
2008 UNSPOKEN
2012 KID