Watch an exclusive clip from the Oscar-nominated Close, the Belgian boyhood drama unlike anything else

Lukas Dhont's Close, now in theaters, opens on a note of pure, euphoric bliss. It requires no words and barely has any; watching it, you immediately understand what is meant when people describe the movies as a universal language. (Not for nothing, Close has been nominated for the Best International Feature Oscar, in a competitive year.)

Two young boys — teens but only barely — race through a field of flowers, untrammeled. They smile in exhilaration, the pink and yellow blossoms suffusing the frame.

"I grew up on the Flemish countryside very close to a flower farm," Dhont, 31, tells EW. "And so I have these sensations, these memories that I have kept with me, of being young and running through these fields with my friends at the time."

But the filmmaker is quick to dig into the subtext. (Watch the scene in our exclusive clip above.)

"I thought of it as a beautiful opening that is also about the passage from childhood to puberty," offers Dhont. "It's an ideal representation of a Garden of Eden, a sort of innocent state that the film starts in. Among many things, I wanted Close to be about masculinity. And so, these flowers in many ways represent this sort of tenderness, this fragility. I knew that I wanted to contrast them with a vocabulary of imagery that we have seen more in the world of young men: men growing up, soldiers, warriors."

Close becomes a story of these two runners, besties Léo and Rémi (brought to life by a pair of unusually intuitive 13-year-old actors, Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele). Their attachment, unexamined yet deeply felt, runs into trouble when the new school year begins, bringing with it bullies, peer pressure, and an instinct to conform. Dhont's film is radical for addressing a subject rarely approached by American screenwriters: the pre-sexual love between boys that hasn't been articulated — or put in a box.

"I wanted this to be about that moment in our lives where love doesn't have to have a name," Dhont says, "where it can exist so freely and so boundless and pure. When we listen to 13-year-old boys and how they speak about each other, how they look at each other and how they cling to one another, they all seem to resemble Léo and Rémi. So why do we not represent that reality?"

Dhont's Close, a prizewinner at Cannes and a quiet stunner at private screenings during the run-up to Oscar nominations, will make some viewers uncomfortable — a reaction the director expects. He calls it conditioning. Still, he welcomes the kind of self-examination his movie is bound to trigger.

"I'm also conditioned to look in that way," he admits. "We immediately wonder about their sexualities. It's something I've confronted in myself."

Apart from running in fields of flowers, Dhont remembers being a kid who fantasized about making films and going to the Oscars. His first feature will enjoy the kind of exposure that few debuting voices can claim. "There's nothing as powerful as chasing your childhood dreams," he says, "even if, as you become an adult, they transform into other things."

There is that dividing line. Close, to its great credit, sits right on it.

Related content:

• Close review: A gorgeously devastating portrait of adolescence
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• Where to stream the 2023 Oscar nominees