An early fan of Lee Chang-dong's slow-burning thriller, Lukas admires this film that "is a sort of subtle symphony and about trying to find meaning in life."
Intrigued by Greek cinema from his school days, Lukas considers Yorgos Lanthimos's innovative drama a major influences in his filmmaking: "What excites me with his cinema is I feel like he's constantly reinventing something."
"I started to understand that maybe I wanted to use cinema not to disappear but to confront-to show things that I had struggled with, maybe, in order to try to understand them bit by bit."
Sasha, a young trans girl who is confronted with society's pushback against her gender identity. This film hits close to home for Lukas, as Sasha's real-life struggles mirror those of Lara, the lead character in Lukas's debut feature, GIRL
Lukas says that Barry Jenkins's masterful triptych about Black masculinity, heteronormativity and sexual identity inspires "the best possible jealousy-I feel like this is a film that I would have loved to have made."
The calibrated balance between fiction and documentary is something that Lukas admires about Chloé Zhao's second feature, which he calls "a very physical experience."
Lukas says, "A lot of the times when I was on the playground, I felt that I didn't really belong to the group of boys and I didn't really belong to the group of girls. I felt like I fell in between a little bit."
Revisiting the begonia fields in Belgium where his 2022 coming-of-age film was shot, Lukas details the production process behind the flower-planting scenes.
