I first came across the work of Pol Cruchten a year after arriving in Luxembourg when I went to see his bleak drug addiction drama “Hochzaeitsnuecht”. It was a wake-up call to the darker side of Luxembourg from which I had been thus far sheltered. But that was Pol’s brilliance and courage--his determination to tell the truth on screen, to provoke debate and to shine a spotlight on those who have fallen by the wayside or have suffered indignity or injury. His short film “Sniper”, in which he a gunman picks off drinkers at one of my watering holes of the time, the B49 on boulevard Royal, was a neatly executed exercise in dramatic tension.

But it was social issues and the lot of the underdog and the misfortunate to which Pol kept coming back. “Black Dju” was a wonderfully human story of a Cape Verdian looking for his father on the streets of Luxembourg. His most personal film, the poetic documentary “Never Die Young”--again about heroin addiction--was Luxembourg’s entry to the best foreign language film category for the 2015 Academy Awards after it won the best documentary prize at the Lëtzebuerger Filmpräis.

It was only in 2001, when the Cinénygma film festival I co-founded with one of Pol’s good friends, Romain Roll, premiered his foray into American cinema, “Boys On The Run”, that I got to know Pol personally.

We were the same age and shared a passion for music--he loved many of the bands from my hometown of Manchester and told me he especially had a soft spot for my favourites, The Happy Mondays. We shared drinks on Romain’s chilly balcony one winter with a deer on the spit, dined together at the festival in Cannes on several occasions, and Pol was never less than fascinating company. He had a superb dry wit and a wicked, smoke-clogged laugh, but there was also an inescapable sense of fatalism about him.

Jokingly, Pol never quite forgave me for being on the 2007 Lëtzebuerger Filmpräis jury that failed, unjustly, to award his excellent adaption of Jhemp Hoscheit’s “Perl oder Pica” the main prize--though it did win the audience prize. But he was always a gentleman and when his brilliant documentary “Voices from Chernobyl” was rightly acclaimed by critics and audiences we talked at length about the film and his connection with Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich on whose book it was based.

But Pol also never forgot his roots and through his production company Red Lion he was instrumental in helping numerous young Luxembourg film makers, including Govinda Van Maele, Jacques Molitor, Laura Schroeder and Max Jacoby, kickstart their careers.

Many of them have already joined the flood of messages on social media mourning the loss of Pol and praising his contribution to Luxembourg cinema. His courage and vision will be sorely missed.