Ivan Govar

Ivan Govar's name is completely forgotten today. Not that it has ever been famous... And yet this Belgian filmmaker is definitely out of the ordinary. Didn't he proclaim himself (and quite rightly so) the youngest director in Europe? As a matter of fact, he was only nineteen made his first short Nous n'irons plus au bois (1955) and twenty at the time of his first feature film Le toubib, médecin du gang (1956). Wasn't he the only Belgian director to make seven films during the 1955-1965 decade? Didn't he manage to hire such big names as Albert Préjean, Blanchette Brunoy, Madeleine Robinson, Maurice Clavel, Alain Cuny, Alain Cavalier, Pierre Brasseur, Michel Simon or Bernard Dimey ? And wasn't he the youngest retired director in Europe since he quit the director's chair at the early age of thirty? Maybe because none of this films (mostly crime movies or thrillers) ever scored a real success... Agreed, Ivan Govar's films are far from cinematic masterpieces but they have their moments. That is the reason why unindentified filmed objects such as Cross of the Living (1962), Agent of Doom (1963) and Two Hours to Kill (1966) would benefit from being shown again and reappraised.