The next step
As It May Be is part of a wider evolution for Bieke, who refuses to be limited by the conventions of the stills medium. She directed her first short film, Dvalemodus, with musician Mattias De Craene, in 2017. It was shot in the Norwegian village of Skaland on a Canon C100 Mark II, so she was able to use her existing Canon lenes. "It was a very easy switch," she says.
The film came about while she was in Norway during the winter, doing a residency. "Skaland was a very interesting place. The harsh nature and constant darkness were really inspiring. I tried to make portraits of people and to capture the atmosphere, but it felt like still photography was not enough."
The nine-minute film sits on the borders between fiction and fact, staging and observation, using the inhabitants of Skaland in scenes inspired by their daily lives. It tells the story of a village engulfed by perpetual darkness and has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Despite her success in filmmaking, she has no plans to move away from photography entirely. The power of a still image is clear from one encounter she had in Egypt. She will never again meet most of the people in her Egyptian, US or Russian series, but she made an exception for Walla, a young girl she photographed in Cairo in 2012.
Returning to the city last year, she decided to look up Walla's family and was amazed by the impact her image had on them. "I'd lost their names, their phone number and their address," she recalls. "I only knew roughly where they were living. I framed [a print of] the image and went back and found them. I'll always remember seeing them again. They were so happy to have the photograph and hung it up straight away. It was a beautiful moment."