What I was looking for, perhaps, was not a treasure

In 2024, something from the past called out to me.

It began with an email sent, for no apparent reason, by a stranger: the portrait of an ancestor, just as unknown to me, on display at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Then came an iconic building in Brussels, designed by my great-grandfather, and the strange feeling that something of my story was waiting for me there.

So I followed the thread.

One lead opened another.

Places. Encounters. Archives. Sometimes unsettling coincidences. Doors that opened, and others that closed.

A story of family memory buried within walls.

A kind of treasure map that surfaced from my unconscious, so precise and “real” that I was able to draw it on paper.

Even more astonishing: this drawing matched the interior layout of a real place, which I was later able to verify with my own eyes.

Yet I had never set foot in that building. I didn’t know its interior layout and had never seen any photographs of it.

I searched. Followed my intuitions. And discovered certain material elements that seemed to corroborate the drawing.

Other elements of this strange family story, unknown to me until then, also proved true in reality.

For nearly two years, this treasure hunt led me through a family history of which I knew barely a few fragments.

But it also brought me back to my own recent story, the one that had just been unfolding in the present.

What was the meaning of all this?

The few people I confided this mystery to found the story fascinating. It seemed to unfold like a film before our eyes.

In a writing circle, where we had to imagine synopses, one inspired by my story even earned me the nickname “the Belgian Dan Brown.”

That made me laugh.

And at the same time… why not?

I’ve always had a vivid imagination. But this time, imagination seemed to strangely meet reality.

Later, I had the chance to meet well-known film directors, intrigued by my adventure and the screenplay it could become.

I had also begun exchanging with an author.

But something kept getting stuck in the same place.

I couldn’t yet look at this story with enough distance.

I was living it.

I was told:

“Come back and see us when you’re done.”

And I too thought I needed to know the ending before I could take all this material and turn it into something else.

So I kept searching.

I wanted to know what was inside the walls.

I wanted to understand.

I wanted to find.

At times, I even wanted to prove that what I had sensed had a tangible reality.

Then something in me said: enough.

I may never know what there was — or wasn’t — to find.

And curiously, today, that hardly matters anymore.

Because in the meantime, the quest took me elsewhere.

Many years earlier, I had founded a company born from a deeply personal vision. It grew far beyond anything I had imagined.

I came out of it with the feeling of having lost something that couldn’t be measured only in money or ownership.

I thought I was searching for traces of an old story.

I was also meeting my own.

Then, in early 2026, a serious personal event suddenly confronted me with my own finitude.

And something changed.

Not the story.

My position within the story.

I’m still in it. After all, as long as we’re alive, where does a story really end?

But today, I can also look at it with more distance.

Being both the one who lives it and the one who observes it.

And I no longer need to know how it ends.

I don’t even need to know for certain what was inside the walls.

The material is already there.

The real. The memories. The archives. The encounters. The coincidences. The intuitions. The imagination. What I found. What I never found. And everything this journey stirred within me.

Perhaps the meaning of this story wasn’t something to be discovered once and for all.

Perhaps it keeps appearing as the story transforms — and as I transform with it.

What do I want to do with the time I’ve been given?

How can I be more fully alive?

What if all this material became a work of art?

A film, perhaps.

No longer a film seeking to solve the mystery or prove what really happened.

But a work that could play with this material.

The real and the imagined.
What is documented and what remains mysterious.
What is passed on.
What disappears.
What we believe we are searching for outside ourselves.
What ultimately brings us back to ourselves.

I don’t yet know what form this story will take.

And this time, I don’t want to find out alone.

I’m not looking for someone to execute an already-written idea.

I want to experience creation through interdependence: each of us fully in our own place, bringing what the other doesn’t have, so that something neither of us could have created alone can emerge.

So I’m putting out this call to live a new adventure, without knowing exactly who it will speak to.

Perhaps someone will read these lines and simply feel:

“I want to go and see.”

If so, let’s meet.

I am looking for a partner to carry this story toward a film — someone who knows how to build, finance, mobilize, without ever rewriting the vision in my place.

Let’s meet