From the Los Angeles Times:Bullying is not just an epidemic in American schools, but an increasingly brutal worldwide phenomenon that can result in damaged psyches and death, as the headlines too often reveal.
That's what led to the making of “Ben X,” an award-winning drama from Belgium opening Friday at the Nuart Theatre. The movie revolves around a 16-year-old boy named Ben (Greg Timmermans) who has Asperger’s syndrome -- an autistic disorder characterized by difficulties in social interactions and restricted patterns of behavior and interests.
Ben is mercilessly ridiculed and tormented by his classmates, and the only way he can escape such harsh realities is by playing the video game Archlord. In that virtual world, he is a hero who vanquishes the villains.
Bullying "is one of these epidemics that seem hard to root out," says Nic Balthazar, who wrote and directed the film. "Bullying in itself and bullying, the name itself, is even too slight for what it is. It is psychological warfare. It is like psychological degrading of somebody else. This goes on in every school in the Western world and is often a lot harder than the harshest reality we portray in the movie."
And what he shows in the movie is not for the squeamish. At one point, Ben's pants are pulled down in class, with the incident shot on camera phones and then put on the Internet. Another time, two of the most brutal bullies kidnap him, forcing him to miss his bus and train."A lot of people ask me, 'Why did you make such a hard movie?' " Balthazar says. "I said, if I made a film about the things I have heard, if I had even gone closer to the reality, this would have been near unwatchable."
"Ben X" is based on the true story of a 17-year-old Belgian boy with Asperger's who killed himself.
"He went to a normal school," Balthazar says. "He was a gifted, bright young boy, but being unable to defend himself in this social game, where you need such skill to survive. . . . He said in his goodbye note that he was pushed over the edge, bullied to death. I can tell you in the real story [the bullying incidents] were even sexual in nature, so you can easily imagine what things happened."
The film ultimately stems from Balthazar's status at home in Belgium as a popular TV personality and talk-show host with a following among young viewers. Several years ago, he was asked to write a book that would appeal to teens who don't read books.
"It is a problem over here, as it is Stateside -- all the young adolescents play video games, watch movies, watch TV but don't read books anymore. The very day I was asked to write the book, the story of the young boy who killed himself was in the paper. I remember in the same paper there as an interview with his mother, who said there was nothing that anybody could ever tell her that would offer any consolation. So I thought I should try to write something about this for young people, as a message of 'Maybe we should think about what happened here.'
"The book, "Nothing Is All He Said," was such a success that it was turned into a popular play. "A young actor who was in a soap series wanted to do a solo performance," he says. "So we made it a plot with lots of video and music. It was an even bigger hit than the book."
The movie has also scored with audiences. Though it did not receive an Oscar nomination, it was Belgium's official entry into the 2007 Academy Awards in the foreign-language film category. And it received three prizes at the Montreal World Film Festival, including most popular film, and the Red Star Award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.In traveling around the world with his movie, Balthazar has learned that teen angst is everywhere.
"In Korea, people said it's a very Korean story. You go to Sweden and they say it's such a Swedish story," says the filmmaker, who is adapting his script for an American version of "Ben X."
That universality, of course, leads one to wonder how the problem can be dealt with, especially when such angst turns into thoughts of suicide. As a solution, one psychiatrist in the U.S. told Balthazar that "just as we teach teens CPR, they should be taught what to do when their friends talk about wanting to give up. We should teach their brothers and sisters and friends how to handle this."