Branden, the graduation film by Brussels’ first city poet Lisette Ma Neza, is a collective poem about the fire and smoke of armed conflicts, which turn people into refugees. A poetic conversation with five different women about leaving the place where they were born, about never really arriving. An ode to the displaced woman.

“To me, Branden represents a fire that never goes out. It reminds me of a line from a poem by Alfred Schaffer: “I was a dark body that you could blow out, but I burned anyway.” I also see that constant burning in my mother and grandmother, who lived through the genocide in Rwanda: the burning of that great violence and trauma, but at the same time, the love for a country being destroyed. You take on that light as a daughter, as the next generation. I tried to describe the feeling of that warmth,” Ma Neza told Kortfilm.be in an interview.