THE SCENT REMAINS
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
The Scent Remains is a creation by artist and director Frederik Heyman, bringing together his digitally constructed universes with the physical performance practice of Milou Van Duijnhoven. Heymans work emerges from artificial structures, curated in virtual spaces, and creates digital relics to preserve memories of the past, while her practice originates from the body and its vulnerability. Van Duijnhovens work, particularly Soft Sticky Stamina Song (2019), created in a moment of grief, deeply resonated with Heyman because it approaches grief not as narrative, but as endurance: cyclical, physical, and unresolved. This film became the point where he is bringing these opposites into direct confrontation and dialogue.
The Scent Remains unfolds as a hybrid mourning ritual set inside a black, timeless void. It is an active filmset where reality and nothingness continuously collapse into one another. The viewer moves through three arenas: The End, The Loop, and The Beginning, interconnected with an intermission space. These are not linear chapters but emotional states, fragments of memory trapped in repetition and transformation.
The blueprint of the film is heavily informed by gaming logic. The first-person camera perspective is essential: The Spectator, experienced through the film’s first-person point of view, is an invisible yet constantly present figure. It is a “person” who never fully appears, but whose hands, camera, and gaze determine the structure of the film. The Spectator exists simultaneously as player, witness, carrier of grief, audience member, and meta-character. They occupy the role of an observer who can witness but never intervene. Their gaze itself becomes part of the mourning process. The Spectator functions both as an avatar for the audience and as a reflection of the filmmaker himself, Frederik Heyman.Digital techniques within the film like the green-screen environments, duplication of the performer, distortion of reality, visible bts of the stages, and non-linear time function as emotional architecture (as grief is non-linea). The digital becomes a sensory layer through which grief is guided, misled, processed, repeated, and preserved. At the same time, the physical body resists this preservation.
Milou’s performance carries breath and exhaustion, tension, and fragility in ways that cannot fully be stabilized or archived.
The Scent Remains is an attempt to make grief experiential rather than explanatory. The film moves through cycles of destruction, repetition, and transformation, searching for a space where memory can briefly become tangible before dissolving once again. It is a work about the memory as an unstable landscape, it is a work about loss, but above all about the traces that remain behind.
When everything else disappears, only the scent remains…
STILLS
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CREDITS
A film by Frederik Heyman
Performance by Milou van Duijnhoven
Production: Roxane Lemaire & Marie Mettepenningen for Bounce Rocks
Sound Production: Yves De Mey & Tim De Smet for Sonhouse
Special thanks to: Sonhouse, Dennis Vanderbroeck, Immersive Lab AP Hogeschool Antwerpen
Integrated light installation ("Ailix lamp") by Vincent Decat
Green-key DOP: Simon Cools Fierlafijn
Green-Key Lighting on Talent: Pieter-Jan Donckels
Green-Key Electro / Technical Support: Jens Callewaert
Green-Key Sound Recording for Talent: Andries Essels
Green-Key Studio Clean-Up: Siana Van Hoecke
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