Une histoire taillée dans le bois
Bois Brever
The Client
Bois Brever is a sawmill in Huldange, in Luxembourg’s Ardennes, founded in 1947. For more than 75 years, the same family has run it: cutting, planing, drying, and treating spruce sourced from the surrounding forests, and shipping finished lumber across Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, and France.
The mill today is Corinne and her father’s, the latest link in a family that has been in this business for generations. It’s a working operation on 4.5 hectares, producing over 40,000 cubic metres of timber a year, and still, at its centre, a family showing up to the same site their relatives built decades ago.
The Challenge
A business like this rarely stops to tell its own story. There’s wood to cut, orders to fill, and a mill to run. Bois Brever had never had a film that showed what the operation actually is, or what it means to the family that’s kept it going for four generations.
The story had two parts that needed to hold together. One was operational: the full journey of a tree, from harvest in the woods to a finished board leaving the mill. The other was personal: a father and daughter, and what it means to carry forward something your family built before you were born.
Deliverables
1x Brand film
3x Service videos
A series of high resolution photography, including drone
Our Approach
We don’t start with a script. We start with the real story.
For Bois Brever, that meant following the operation exactly as it happens: from the woods where the trees are harvested, through every stage on the mill floor, to the finished product heading out the door. No staged demonstrations, no reenactments. Just the real process, filmed as it ran.
The other half of the story was Corinne and her father. Rather than asking them to perform for the camera, we asked questions and let them talk about the mill, the family, and what it means to carry on a business that three generations kept running before them. That’s where the film found its weight. A sawmill is a process. A family business is a story, and this one had never been told on camera before.
From above, drone footage revealed what’s hard to appreciate from the ground: the full scale of the site, the timber yards, and the forest the whole operation depends on.
Our Process
1. Discovery and Planning
Before filming a single frame, we mapped the full operation: the harvest, the mill floor, each stage the wood passes through, and where Corinne and her father fit into that story. We worked closely with the interviewer and translator to shape the interview questions, making sure each one would draw out the family’s history and values in their own words while translating clearly for the final film. As on every Alpenglow project, the director led that first call, so the person shaping the film understood the operation, the people, and the story from day one.
2. Production
We filmed on site from the woods to the mill, following the wood through every stage of its transformation and capturing the craft and care that goes into each step. Alongside the process footage, we sat down with Corinne and her father for an unscripted conversation, giving them the space to tell their story naturally rather than reciting lines. Drone footage brought in the scale of the operation and the landscape it depends on.
3. Post-Production
Editing, sound design, and colour grading wove the process footage and the family’s story into a single brand film that moves at the pace of the work itself. From the same production, we also delivered three service videos, each focused on a specific part of the business, along with a curated set of stills and aerial photography ready for the website, social media, and print.
The Outcomes
Bois Brever finally has a film that shows what the mill actually is, not just the products it makes, but the operation and the family behind it. For a business that had never told its own story before, seeing it on screen landed harder than expected. It’s a family business, and after generations of quiet work, they finally had their story told.
That’s what a documentary approach can do for a company like this. Not a product reel, but proof of what the business actually means to the people running it.