Sous l’Arbre – Creative Development Consultancy & Artist Residency

Creative Development Consultancy

Root and master your thinking skills, concepts and writing. Improve insights, impact and resonance of your feature, series, documentary, performance, artwork. Strengthen your artistic voice.

Artist Residence

Short and mid-length stay residences and work spaces for writers and artists at a calm and verdant historical location in the Ardennes.

Permaculture Garden

Sharing knowledge and practice in a permaculture garden in Northern France.

Miryam van Lier

We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

While coming across ample originality and talent throughout my work in the arts, I am almost as often struck by the displayed lack of deeper curiosity about life in proposals and finished works alike.

A meaningful piece performs an inspiringly provocative balancing act. It manoeuvres between separate truths, between welcoming recognition and unsettling friction. From a work that makes a difference, the audience will take home a more inclusive opening to sense-making.

Exploring this fully has become the core of my consulting practice.

Testimonials

Developing a script can breed uncertainty. It entails digging deep, encountering failures, and starting afresh. Miryam understands this process like no other. What I admire most about her is her rejection of the usual certainty that most cinema professionals adhere to. She embraces paradoxes, implicit narratives, and everything that defines our humanity.

It is not often that an encounter impacts the way you will work in the future. Miryam reshapes, inspires and enriches the way you think. She applies a ton of her own experience, and combines it with broad and deep knowledge of art and literature, and applies all of that in a very practical way to get you to better analyse and develop your own material. You will be challenged, destabilised, recompassed and then come out more steadfast, determined and more precise than ever before.

There is something very unique about Miryam. As a coach she dares to rely more on intuition and life experience than on method. She teaches you how to use the power of speech to influence reality and guides you to the core of your story in an almost magical way. As a good listener, she delves into the depths of your own soul, beyond your deepest fears. By constructively questioning every word you’ve written, she helps you gain a better understanding of what you may not fully comprehend yourself yet. After letting Miryam in, you can no longer hide as a writer or filmmaker; in return you are offered a special place and the warmth and security to explore and expand your story. The wide fairytale landscapes of Hardoncelle provide you with the space and time needed to find the right words and language.

Miryam helped me discover what it is I want to interrogate with my film and how to use all the story elements to formulate this thematic question in the sharpest possible way. With an almost surgical precision, Miryam always discovers the flaws in my writing. Fortunately in the same effort, she alway will uncover some signposts that help me find my way again.

Miryam combines a sharp and analytic mind with a big, warm heart. Building on a rich fundament of life and work experiences, she inspires and stimulates writers to deeply question, rethink and optimize the core of what they want to tell. She encourages and helps them to develop real, multi-layered characters with intertwined relationships and captivating storylines. Should you be lucky enough to work in her residence at her home in France, you’ll find a piece of paradise and a lady of the house you won’t easily forget.

Miryam is smart, sharp and a joy to work with. She flawlessly knows how to lead you to the essence of your story and make it truly meaningful. I love her.

I’ve felt more like a participant than a co-mentor whilst working alongside Miryam at the Concept Atelier for television series at the Flemish Film Fund in Brussels for the past four years. Her mentoring skills are phenomenal. I marvel at her competence, knowledge and abilities to grab both texts and writers by the heels and draw them back to the source of their work. She prevents us all from resting our feet on the floor as tropes, metaphors and cliches are rooted out like invasive species. If you’re lucky enough to get time with Miryam, then get a good night’s sleep the night before.

Whether it’s an hour or a five day stay, every session with Miryam is a treat for your project. With her critical, but mostly curious and sensitive perspective, she will offer new ways of comprehending your work, its inner structures and themes, its relation to the audience and therefore the world in general. Miryam’s questions and suggestions are like shots of oxygen to your work in progress, and in case you choose to stay with her in France: so are her beautiful garden and the peaceful walks around the hills and woods. In short: working with Miryam is like cardio, but for the brain. You’ll be so happy you did it.

Miryam made me delve to the core of my intentions for this film, and helped me stay connected to it when I felt lost.The clarity and profundity with which she questions each behavior of the characters, made me embrace the complexity of their own psychology.

Because my screenplay is layered, philosophical and poetic, and it is more about atmosphere and feeling than plot, I was initially a bit apprehensive of a script coach who would come up with standard solutions and where I would have to defend my individuality.
During the working sessions of two or three days each time, we made giant leaps in development. Miryam proved capable of mercilessly pointing out weaknesses, inconsistencies and ambiguities, forcing me to become sharper and clearer, without the fragile artistic edifice I wanted to build carefully and precisely, collapsing. This sharpness and an almost cool, critical matter-of-factness in analysis Miryam coupled with a personal and warm approach: her heartfelt interest in what I had to say gave me confidence and security in this fragile process. It made the screenplay more accessible, solid and rich, but also created more room for the depth I was looking for.

Finds & Events

Jardins d’Orsan

Posted in Garden visits in 2023

Chateau & Parc de Courances

Posted in Garden visits in 2023

Full moon, Hardoncelle, 7 a.m. Oct 2023

Posted in Hikes in 2023

Sousl’Arbre