Eric Vauthier · Co-founder of La Rétine de Plateau · pioneer of independent cultural events in Brussels
Virtual Palace, today
Eric Vauthier never stopped. Since 1994, he has owned the Virtual Palace, an 1860 building that was the Belgian headquarters of Gaumont from 1946 to 1994. He is turning it into a 21st-century cinema house on a human scale: bar, private cinema in the period stable, green screen, virtual-reality headsets, daily filming-location hire. The place was used as a set for Anissa Bonnefont's film La Maison, with Ana Girardot, Aure Atika and Rossy de Palma.
“We must recreate cinema venues on a human scale,” he says today. Forty years apart, it is exactly the sentence of the young man who filled the Métropole on Sunday mornings. Some people change their minds with the times; he defended his until the times caught up with it.