︎︎︎ ALL WE EVER WANTED WAS EVERYTHING / 2014 ︎︎︎

written & directed: enzo smits
co-production: luca school of arts 
shot by: grimm van de kerckhove
sound: kwinten van laethem
editing: thomas pooters
19 minutes


All We Ever Wanted Was Everything portrays a group of young skateboarders growing up in a Flemish suburban town. We meet different characters in their daily routines: riding around on their skateboards, waiting, hanging out, daydreaming... . They fantasize about going away, but don’t know where to go.The images on their TV screens serve as a gateway, just like the posters on their bedroom walls. The film is a personal retrospect on youth told through moments with friends, accidental encounters, places, trivial moments, restagings of memories,.... .

“ With All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, Smits reintroduces us to our daily surroundings, to things that no longer catch our eye. In this act of really looking at what surrounds us, we finally see the beauty of it. Cinema, memetic in its essence, is the perfect medium to confront us with a reality we claim to know. Smits forces our gaze to land on what we prefer to overlook. The ordinary becomes extraordinary; banalities become spectacular. Carefully he chips away at the layers of his film until an associative collage of images remains. However contradictory it might sound, it is exactly this erasure that adds meaning. An absence so noticeable it becomes a presence. In All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, skating takes on that role of absent presence.”