We never wanted to make a promotional film about an upcoming country artist. What really interested us was the tension that comes with giving your all to a genre and culture that doesn’t originally belong to you.

We have known Koen for a long time, which meant we were able to film very close to him without performance or distance. Over time, we became less interested in whether he would actually succeed in Nashville, and more interested in the strange emotional space he was living in while striving towards his goals.

Country music shaped almost every part of his identity, despite growing up thousands of miles away from where that culture originated. Watching him arrive in Nashville for the first time raised questions we kept returning to during filming: when does admiration become imitation? Can you ever fully belong to a culture you were not born into? And who gets to decide that?

What fascinated us most was that the film never offered a simple answer. Koen is both deeply sincere and highly conscious of how he fits into the world of country music. He genuinely loves it and understands it on a deep emotional level, yet he is also constantly searching for confirmation that he sounds, looks and feels “Nashville enough.” We were drawn to that contradiction.

RUNNER UP is a film about ambition and identity, but also about the painful possibility that sometimes being good is still not the same as truly belonging.