Director: Anthony Schatteman
Starting high school rarely comes with an easy script, and Young Hearts, a 2024 drama from Belgium and the Netherlands, uses that transition to examine how differently the same relationship can be judged depending on who is standing where.
What is Young Hearts about?
Harper is just beginning high school when a connection forms with Tilly, her older brother's best friend, and the film follows what happens once that bond becomes visible to everyone around them. Where Harper faces skepticism and social fallout for the relationship, Tilly, older and further along in school, is met with something closer to approval, and the gap between those two reactions becomes the film's real subject. Rather than framing the story as a simple romance, Young Hearts uses the mismatch in how each of them is treated to look at double standards that persist even as attitudes are supposedly changing. Set against the backdrop of a cultural moment shaped by movements like Time's Up and Me Too, the film treats its central couple less as a fixed pairing and more as a lens for examining consent, age, and perception. It's a quiet, contemporary coming-of-age story built around an uncomfortable asymmetry.
Cast & crew
Lou Goossens and Marius De Saeger lead the cast, supported by Geert Van Rampelberg, Emilie De Roo, Dirk van Dijck, Jul Goossens, Saar Rogiers, and Ezra van Dongen. Anthony Schatteman directed the film, working with a largely Belgian and Dutch ensemble to bring the story's more intimate, small-scale moments to the screen.
Context & significance
Young Hearts arrives from Belgium and the Netherlands, part of a wave of European coming-of-age films willing to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it with a tidy ending. Its interest in how differently a relationship can be perceived depending on age and gender places it alongside other recent films grappling with post-Me Too questions about consent and social judgment, though its setting keeps the tone grounded and small-scale rather than issue-driven.
Where & how to watch
Young Hearts is available on K-Time with Persian subtitles, letting Farsi-speaking viewers follow the original dialogue with translated text on screen. This page, along with the cast information and FAQs below, can be read without an account; watching the film itself requires logging into K-Time, which is designed around a Farsi-first experience for Persian-speaking audiences abroad.