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What to watch: Young Hearts

A film by Anthony Shatteman that explores the emotional roller-coaster of falling in love.

Gaydar

08 Aug 2025 — 6 min read

Young Hearts is the feature debut of Anthony Shatteman.

Exploring the emotional roller-coaster of falling in love for the first time, the story focuses on 14-year-old Elias (Lou Goossens). When new neighbours move in next door, Elias quickly falls for Alexander (Marius De Saeger). It's the first time that Elias has felt powerful emotions such as this and he struggles to navigate relationships with friends and family as he wrestles with his inner chaos.

Anthony Shatteman on How To Date Men

For our podcast, How To Date Men, we caught up with Anthony Shatteman for a behind-the-scene look at the film.

In the conversation, we talk coming-of-age, searching for innocence, and why queer kids need fairy-tale princes.

Listen to the episode

Young Hearts is a coming of age film. We follow 14-year-old Elias as he's navigating his feelings for the new neighbour Alexander. You've said that you wanted to create a coming-of-age story that wasn't sexual because you wanted to make it accessible to younger audiences. Why was that important to you?

I think when I became thirty, I was getting bit more melancholic than before. And I was looking back at who I was. In 2012, I made a short film about the same topic, but it was more like revenge against my father, who was not okay with me being gay in the beginning. And this short film was quite innocent. There were no sexual scenes. It was really just about first love.

It was a big success at a lot of youth festivals and a lot of young people were writing to me from all over the world - thank you for finally having an example where it's okay to just be yourself. It was never my intention to do films for a young audience, but it was still on my mind that so many young people were happy with the story.

So, a lot of people told me, make something long about it. But I was over the topic of coming-of-age movies. I wanted to do something new for my first feature because it's quite important to have a good first feature film.

But I was still waiting for a love story that I could show to young people. I think I was not ready when I was 25, but at the age of 30, I decided to just do it and to really go back to my own youth and to really make the movie that I wanted to exist when I was like a kid from 12, 13, 14 years old without it showing sexual scenes because those movies are already there.

Can you show, Call Me By Your Name to a nine year old - where they jerk off in a movie? Or Brokeback Mountain, where they fuck in a tent? Of course, those are amazing, important movies, but in every coming-of-age movie, I found sexual scenes. So I really tried to focus on just first love and innocence.

How did that feel to translate your own experiences into the story in that way?

In the beginning, it was never my idea to make a film about me and my family in the street where I grew up, in my school. Those things evolved during the writing process. But I remember when I was young, I had lot of questions about my identity, my sexuality. And in the little town where I grew up, no one was gay.

We lived like 15 minutes from Ghent, the biggest city close to us. But in my Catholic school, there were no examples about a man and another man falling in love. It was always the typical Disney version of the movies that I saw, even in literature and culture. In my family and friends, there was no one talking about it.

I couldn't find the example I needed. And it was always on my mind, like why I was really a big fan of the Disney classics, like Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, all these amazing movies. And never did I see an example where there were two princes?

My best friend is Lucas Dohnt. He made the movie Girl. I went on tour with him a lot and I saw him talking about the movie and it was such a straightforward pitch that I realised I need to make the movie that's in me. It's such a straightforward story. It's about me and my father, my older brother, my mum. I just needed to be ready to take my heart and put it in a script.

It's easy to imagine that religious conservatives would be likely to object to such a positive portrayal of teenagers exploring their queerness and their emotions in that sort of space. Did that context shape the way that you approach this film?

I was a bit afraid during the writing, like, was I going too far? I was thinking about people who were going to tell me that this is propaganda for being gay or something.

The film was first screened at the Berlinale. The first screening was just for adults but the second screening there were 1,500 kids in the room. We'd never done a test screening for a young audience so I was really nervous going into the screening. In the first 15 or 20 minutes - when the kids realised what they were going to see - a lot of them were booing and were very negative about it. But the crazy thing is that it changed during the movie. At the end, everyone was cheering and clapping - it was so cool because all the teachers told me you really shifted these kids' opinion in like 90 minutes. So that's really cool to see.

I was ready for negative reactions, but in all these months now, I've never had any negative reactions. Because I really focused on the innocence in these children and I really wanted to have two children experience first love, I think it's too cute to be negative about.

Was this a difficult film to cast?

For the parents, I already knew who I wanted. But for the kids, I wrote them in the script as two 15-year-olds. And then we did an open casting between 11 and 18.

Immediately we saw that 18-year-olds were too old.

Our search was really about finding innocence - we weren't specifically looking for 14-year-olds, 13-year-olds, 16-year-olds. But after seeing about 1,500 boys, we were getting really desperate.

One day we were at the art school in Brussels and we found Marius. We'd actually already seen him in castings but he had been wearing a cap. On this day, he was playing football with his friends and you could see his curly hair - he looked like an angel.

Four days later, Lou came in for a casting and they had this chemistry - I saw it immediately.

We never asked them, do you like boys or girls? This wasn't important for me, but we talked about emotions and they really understood the same emotions as we did.

We asked them, are you sure you want to be the face of a gay movie. They were like, this story is so important that we really want to be the face of it.

What do hope that people feel when they watch Young Hearts?

Every time after a screening, I feel so much happiness and love. It's not only kids that thank me for making the movie - a lot of parents reach out to me and tell me that after seeing the movie, they regret the way they reacted when their kids came out.

I also have another generation of people aged 65 and over who say that the film helped them realise that they had a love like this, but it was something that they'd never been able to talk about.

The base of the movie was really a children movie - I made it for eight to 12 year olds, but luckily enough, everyone likes these feelings of butterflies, maybe.