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Bill Plympton is a household name amongst animation filmmakers and illustrators. His illustrations have been published in The New York Times and magazines such as Vogue, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Your Face prompted his career in the heyday of MTV.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an independent investigator or Private Ear. His investigations focus on sound and linguistics. This 45-minute video essay plunges viewers into a chilling chronicle of daily life transformed by the weaponisation of the air, where the terror of repeated incursions becomes a disconcertingly banal backdrop.

Experimental filmmaker Marie Menken was noted for her unique way of filmmaking which incorporated collage techniques. Menken was one of the first New York filmmakers to use a hand-hend camera and trained Any Warhol on it use. “Marie’s films were her flower garden. Whenever she was in her garden, she opened her soul, with all her secret wishes and dreams,” according to Jonas Mekas. 

In the silent avant-garde film Garden of Luxor, Derek Jarman creates an imaginary Arabian garden by superimposing various images like old postcards from Egypt, and discarded images from ancient sword-and-sandal epics. This strange garden gets destroyed occasionally by a man with a whip, or by people smoking and eating insects. This is Jarman’s take on the Garden of Luxor and its mysteries.

Dimanche was intended as a didactic film in which “the problem of leisure” would be addressed. “I was summoned to the Cinéma de l'Éducation Nationale and the director said to me, ‘We would like you to make a film about the problem of leisure.’ Internally, I burst out laughing. What is free time? Joe average who doesn’t know what to do on Sunday? (...) I did not know what free time meant. No more than vacation. One is always on vacation anyway. Unless you’re a lawyer, but then you brought it on yourself, dammit,” Edmond Bernhard said back in the days.

This television documentary about the great British miners’ strike of 1984 was not broadcast by patron ITV because the film was “too political” and sided with the miners. Did anyone really expect anything different from Loach, one of the most politically engaged filmmakers of his generation?

Panning shots describe a room as a succession of still lives: a chair, some fruit on a table, a collection of solitary, waiting objects. Sitting on the bed, there is the presence of a young woman: Chantal Akerman, filmmaker herself, eating an apple.

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.

Wolfgang Kolb, who passed away last year, studied film at INSAS in Brussels. For several years, he filmed the work of dancer and choreographer Roxane Huilmand as she collaborated with the Rosas dance company. Together with Huilmand, he created such works as Muurwerk (1987), in which he translates her choreography into cinematic language.

Passersby on Astor Place in New York City speak a silent language as they walk past the reflective surface of a storefront window. Heller wanted to capture the “unwritten choreography of the street,” the dance of glances.

You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born follows a woman whose life is marked by loss, but in which she still finds humor and love. With a soundtrack that follows the period of Lenore’s life, from her birth in the 1970s to her death in the 2040s, the film takes us from poignant loss to deep joy and dark humor.

Kobarweng or Where Is Your Helicopter? stems from Johan Grimonprez’s visit to Papua New Guinea in 1986. Upon arrival in the village of Pepera, a local villager asked him, “Where is your helicopter?” Grimonprez later learned that a group of anthropologists had come to the village by helicopter in 1959, an event that left a lasting impression on the Indigenous people.

Almost a decade after her in 2022 crowned “best film of all time”, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman made the twelve-minute I’m Hungry, I’m Cold. In it, two young  chain-smoking Brussels girls run away from home, to Paris.

In the Amsterdam street where Chinese photographer To Sang has his photo studio, many nationalities are represented. There is a Surinamese wig store, a Kurdish restaurant, a Chinese jewelry, and a Dutch grocery store. All shop owners decide to have their portraits done by To Sang. Outstanding documentary filmmaker Johan Van der Keuken is there to capture the process.

This experimental music video by Marlon Riggs politicises the homoeroticism of African-American men. With sensual and provocative images, Anthem reaffirms the “self-evident right” to life and liberty in an era of pervasive anti-gay and anti-Black backlash and hysterical cultural oppression.

Lois Weber was the very first female to shoot a feature film and build a rich Hollywood oeuvre that is often compared to that of D.W. Griffith in quality and quantity. A woman of many talents, she began her career in music and theater. Her revolutionary use of split screen, which she pioneered, made her work iconic.

New Zealand artist Le(o)n(ard) Lye became known for his experimental films and kinetic sculptures. This short film is a great energetic burst, with shapes and twists swirling through the image to the rhythm of Cuban music. Lye painted directly on the celluloid film without using conventional camera work. 

When peace proves impossible, all means are justified to defend a political cause. That’s what the suicide-commandos argue. Jocelyne Saab was the first journalist to be able to film these young people, aged between 16 and 20, who were training daily in a secret underground base.

Suzan Pitt, first a painter and fashion designer, later became an icon within the animation world. Her surreal sensations create worlds where nothing is what it seems. The physical rawness, sharp sense of humour, and kaleidoscopic use of colour define a body of work full of new forms.

In July 1982, the Israeli army besieged Beirut. Journalist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab watched her home burn down. One hundred and fifty years of family history went up in smoke. She seeks refuge in questions: when did this all start? How did the people of Beirut experience the siege? Each place then becomes a story, and each name is a memory.

Alice Diop is a French filmmaker of Senegalese descent. After studying colonial history, sociology, and film in Paris, she became an activist, championing gender and racial equality in film and the political mobilisation of young people from working-class neighbourhoods. With Vers la tendresse, she delves into the male territory of a Parisian suburb.

Marlon Riggs eagerly used then-new video technology, combining poetry, music, performance, and documentary to address racist stereotypes. Affirmations is a humorous confession about the desires and dreams of Black gay men, at once tender and political.

Johan Van der Keuken shot The Palestinians in 1975 in Lebanon, before the outbreak of civil war. The film provides a nuanced look at the issue of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Pull My Daisy is a high point in improvisational cinema and a signature film for the Beat Generation. Spontaneity was one of the Beat authors’ formal traits, and this film, too, involved a great deal of improvisation. Pull My Daisy is a high point in improvisational cinema and a signature film for the Beat Generation.

My Childhood was the first of three films based on director Bill Douglas’ memories of his own impoverished childhood in the Scottish mining village of Newcraighall. In this cruel environment, the boy learns to take care of himself. We see him grow up from child to adolescent—angry and bewildered but playful and affectionate.

American documentary filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt is known for his collage films, which often explore the personable and psychological cores of being human. In his most recent film, he questions the relationship between a father and his daughter through home movies.

Japanese video artist Toshio Matsumoto became best known for Funeral Parade of Roses. The experimental short film Atman, on the other hand, is a visual tour-de-force: In the center of a circle, Matsumoto places a figure wearing a Hannya mask. In the circle, he places the camera in 480 different positions. The film seems full of zooms and pans, but they are really the result of a clever edit.

Writer and poet Abigail Child has been a lynchpin of American experimental cinema since the 1980s. A recognised pioneer in editing, she focuses on the interplay between sound and image to create, in the words of L.A. Weekly, “brilliantly exciting work”, with a keen attention to form that helps examine established norms around narration and gender.

Nishikawa’s analogue films often focus on the process of filmmaking itself. Light, Noise, Smoke and Light, Noise, Smoke shows a deceptively complex interplay between fireworks shots taken during a summer festival and the sonic imprints the same images leave on the optical soundtrack.

Mati Diop, niece of filmmaker Djibil Diop Mambéty, mixes facts with fantasy, as in the latter’s best-known film, Touki Bouki. A Thousand Suns thus becomes an homage to this classic film but, above all, a sensitive portrait of a man who, in his own words, “lost himself”.

Palestinian Basma Alsharif examines cyclical political conflicts and counters colonialism’s legacy through satire. Deep Sleep is an immersive performance film in which the artist films under self-hypnosis in Athens and Malta.

The Black Panther movement was the most influential “Black power” organisation of the late 1960s, globally supported by opponents of U.S. imperialism. French filmmaker Agnès Varda canned this short documentary when she and her husband Jacques Demy were in California for his first Hollywood production.

Lamees Almakkawy’s films can be found at the intersection of documentary and fiction, with a particular focus on performance and identity. Dancing Palestine is centered around the dabke, a Palestinian folk dance.

In her films, German director and photographer Ulrike Ottinger parodies cinema conventions, searching for new forms of visual pleasure. In doing so, she constantly challenges the viewer’s position. Many of her highly stylised films also contain fantastic elements.

As a journalist and filmmaker, Jocelyne Saab focused on vulnerable people, from displaced groups to war victims. Her work is marked by the actions necessary to document historical violence. In Children of War, she meets heavily traumatised children left behind after escaping a massacre in a Muslim neighbourhood in Beirut.

At the turn of the century, French-Swiss idiosyncratic filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was invited by the Cannes Film Festival to make a film to open the festival, “commemorating cinema entering its second full century.” Godard delivered De l’origine du XXIe siècle: a fifteen-minute barrage of re-edited footage of wars and Nazi atrocities, interspersed with clips of Godard’s own À bout de souffle.

In Very Nice, Very Nice, avant-garde filmmaker Arthur Lipsett mixes archival photos with unused sound fragments. Retrospectively, he muses on life and wonders if it was all better 30 years ago. His very first film earned Lipsett an Oscar nomination.

In So Can I, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami combines live-action and animation. While two schoolboys watch animated animals (such as jumping kangaroos and swimming fish) on TV, one boy says, “I can do that too,” and then imitates the actions. Kiarostami’s son Ahmad plays the second, silent boy.

As a painter, sculptor, and writer, Marcel Duchamp greatly influenced 20th- and 21st-century conceptual art. His interest in the ‘fourth dimension’ is evident in his film Anémic cinéma, which consists of a series of spirals within spirals rotating in such a way as to create an optical effect—a classic of experimental cinema.

Recess is one of Abbas Kiarostami’s very first short films. We see a boy being punished at school for breaking a window. When he joins a group of schoolmates playing football, he disrupts the fun by stealing the ball and running away. Eventually, he drifts aimlessly along a busy highway.

How does a blind child perceive reality? To explore this question, Johan van der Keuken spent two months in a specialised institution in the Netherlands. Blind child reveals a world hard to imagine: the endless struggle of those who cannot see to stay in touch with reality. Using the film medium, Van der Keuken depicts their unique worldview.

In 1965 filmt Johan van der Keuken zijn innemende buurmeisje Beppie terwijl ze door Amsterdam zwerft en op speelse wijze de wereld ontdekt. Met vriendinnen slentert ze door de stad en klopt te pas en te onpas bij buren aan.

Thai Golden Palm winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker and visual artist. Just like most of his enigmatic oeuvre, this short video work is lyrical and dreamlike. Emerald places two characters from the 1906 Buddhist novel The Pilgrim Kamanita against the backdrop of the Morakot, a Bangkok hotel in the early 1980s, a time of rapid economic development and the arrival of Cambodian refugees in Thailand.

Saleh Kashefi is an Iranian filmmaker who has taken refuge in Switzerland. He decides to attack Ali Khamanei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, out of a desire to “play a role” in the uprising in his native country because “he has affected every second of [his] life.”

On the intersection between performance and film, Palestinian filmmaker Noor Abed’s work explores human relationships. For example, our songs were ready for all wars to come is an 8mm footage choreography of playing women whose stories are linked by communal mourning rituals.

Film Fest Ghent presents a retrospective of Portuguese filmmaker and writer Isadora Neves Marques. Her oeuvre addresses many urgent themes, such as biopolitics, gender, and technology. She calls her work subtle sci-fi that, through criticism, attempts to imagine a better future.

This short video essay, created at the request of the Singapore Art Museum, explores how Palestinian gamers mimic life under colonial occupation in Los Santos as a virtual proxy of the state of Palestine. 

He may never have enjoyed the fame of a Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut, but many regarded Jacques Rozier as their equal. In his second short film, Rentrée des classes, a little boy throws his school bag into the river on the first day of school, which leads to a thrilling adventure.

Artist Rose Lowder makes all her films with a 16mm Bolex that allows her to film frame by frame. She skips and emulsifies some frames and leaves others blank, then uses the same camera to rewind and film these frames. With this method, she creates a new viewing experience in which two different situations are viewed simultaneously.

Johan van der Keuken filmed with a photographic eye and photographed with a cinematic feel. The Cat was commissioned by Dutch television: fifteen filmmakers were asked to make a series in relay style. Van der Keuken wanted to spice everything up and introduced a cat.

One of the great masters of postwar Japanese cinema, rebellious filmmaker Nagasi Oshima was also one of his generation’s most politically engaged artists. Diary of Yunbogi is an ethereal montage of still images with dark, somber undertones based on photographs Oshima took during a study trip to South Korea in 1965.

Jean Vigo was a pioneer in what would later become the French New Wave. Zéro de conduite draws extensively on his own experiences at boarding schools and reflects Vigo’s anarchistic views of his childhood, sketching surreal acts of defiance in a repressive educational institution.

The silent black-and-white film The Private Life of a Cat is an intimate study of a cat who gives birth to a litter of kittens and cares for them as they grow up. It is filmed entirely from the cat’s eye-level.

Cul-de-Sac is not a straightforward story about skaters but reveals itself as a skateboard-inspired film. The skateboard here serves as the driving force, which urges both characters and viewers to contemplate life.

A slideshow records the infatuation of two trans men over a one-year period. The creators collect photographs of real events: their first kiss, meeting each other's parents, a staged wedding, a medical procedure, and the accompanying recovery. The images are, at times, reminiscent of Nan Goldin’s work: raw, fragile, and exceptionally intimate.

There’s no way to prepare for Levi Stoops’ Drijf, and that’s a good thing. The animated filmmaker himself voices Jeremy, and Anemone Valcke plays Aurora. The naked couple is lost at sea and floats across the vast ocean on a small log.

De Beule’s anecdotal documentary paints a timid but inspiring portrait of a specific place and its inhabitants. Mykines lies in the shadow of an archaeological site. The inhabitants reflect on their relationship with the ruins as visitors pass by and the stones slowly crumble beneath their feet.

A ship drifts in the middle of an endless sea. Its crew of five tries to cope with boredom by escaping into a parallel world. elephantfish lures its viewers into an enclosed environment guarded by the freedom of the everlasting horizon. The only escape from this confinement comes in thoughts and dreams.

The work of French activist, novelist, and essayist Jean Genet was considered controversial in the forties and fifties, because of its explicit homosexuality. Genet made only one film in his entire life, but Un Chant d’amour went on to inspire both David Bowie and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 

Met zijn eerste korte film Daydreaming So Vividly About Our Spanish Holidays sleepte de Spaanse Christian Avilés meteen een nominatie voor de European Film Awards in de wacht. De kleurrijke 16mm laat het eiland Mallorca eruit zien als een kinderspeeltuin, waarbij het stralende kleurenpalet ook aandoet als een bevreemdende vernislaag. Achter al die zomerse pracht en praal schuilt iets donker en uncanny.

Crossing the Great Sagrada consists almost exclusively of outtakes from travelogues. The title is a pun on Crossing the Great Sahara, one of the popular travel films of the 1920s that documented “other cultures” in a way that reflected imperial, nationalistic, and often racist stereotypes.

The Seasons shows humanity trapped in a cruel but stunningly beautiful existence. Vast cloudscapes speedily glide across the Armenian highlands: to the melodious rhythm of camerawork, editing, and a lyrical score, Artavazd Peleshian elevates this into a full-blown symphony of life.

In deze bijzondere korte documentaire wordt in een kleine bakkerij alles in gereedheid gebracht voor het maken van brood. We volgen dit alledaagse proces stap voor stap, inclusief het wachten. Net zoals in tal van Alexandre Koberidzes kortfilms toont hij in Linger on Some Pale Blue Dot bijna woordeloos hoe je met verwondering naar de wereld kan kijken.

Belgian film pioneer Henri Storck, born and raised in Ostend, made more than one documentary about his hometown. In Ostende, reine des plages, contemporaries James Ensor and Maurice Jaubert provide the music—a film about the “special happiness of being an Ostendian.”

Ostensibly filmed to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War, production of Kyiv Frescos was discontinued by Russia’s Goskino. It now exists only a series of screen tests that Sergei Parajanov pieced together. But even in its abbreviated form, the film is impressive.

Robert Fenz worked as a cameraman with Chantal Akerman and was one of the most committed filmmakers reviving avant-garde traditions for a long time until he passed away in 2020 at the age of 52. His films, mostly made on black-and-white 16mm, possess a rare energy and restless beauty.

Portuguese filmmaker Jorge Jácome often mixes science fiction with documentary elements. In Flores, the entire population of the Azores is forced to evacuate to the mainland when an uncontrollable infestation of hydrangeas floods the islands.

Artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowciz focuses on civil rights and gay identity within American popular culture. A few years before he died of HIV, he made Beautiful People.

Isaac Julien is a pioneer in video and installation art. His work constantly pushes the boundaries of the medium, combining film with photography, performance, music, and painting. Social inequality is often central to this, and more specifically, his black and queer identity is a thread running through his oeuvre. In his very first film, Who Killed Colin Roach?, he reflects on the death of the 23-year-old title character who was shot at the entrance to a London police building in 1982.

Belgian Roland Lethem’s early work is heavily influenced by surrealists (Buñuel) and  Japanese cinema (Seijun Suzuki, Yoko Ono). Later, his films became increasingly political and also ecologically charged, although certain cruelty and pornography are never far away. Full of irrational images and diverse forms of symbolism, Lethem’s films seem to float between waking and sleeping states.

Dominique Loreau’s feature-length films are strongly anchored in a documentary reality: the actors play themselves and improvise from a predetermined framework that nevertheless welcomes coincidences and the passage of time. This methodology is already visible in her 1987 short film Zig-zags.

Conceptual artist Emily Jacir creates films and installations that focus on the oppression of the Palestinian people. In this intimate film, simultaneously a video essay and a diary, Jacir pleads to register  her childhood home and neighbourhood, “before a crime is inevitably committed.”

The Newest Olds is Pablo Mazollo’s experimental portrait of Detroit in which he unpacks the buildings from their foundations and blurs the political and sensory boundaries between Canada and the United States, through in-camera and optical printing techniques—a transformation of iconic cityscapes.

In an exercise of ironic self-awareness, Chantal Akerman tries to deal with her own procrastination by making a film about laziness itself. The film is part of a collective project in which seven women each are making a short film about one of the deadly sins.

The Brussels Porn Film Festival was created to gain greater recognition for the role of pornography in film history. The programme features alternative porn of various kinds, including this short collage work by Colombian visual artist Marco Antonio Nunez, in which the filmmaker cobbles together his erotic fantasies, using torn-out phalluses and other magazine clippings.

Barbara Meter, born in 1939, is one of The Netherlands’ leading experimental filmmakers. Recently, the Eye Filmmuseum restored much of her work, including Andante Ma Non Troppo. In it, Meter explores what it means to look with the camera.

Belgian filmmaker Samy Szlingerbaum directed the short film Le 15/8 in 1973 together with Chantal Akerman. He then made two short films of his own, including this nocturnal Insomnies, which rhythmically and associatively depicts the neon lights of the Belgian capital—like a dream. A mostly formal experiment of barely nine minutes. 

We can never get enough of Buster Keaton, The Great Stone Face of the 1920s. One Week is the first independent film he released himself, full of new stunts in and around houses and on ladders.

Arnold Schwarzenegger won his first Mr. Universe title at the age of 20. He was also named Mr. Olympia seven times. During one of those many bodybuilder competitions, Dutch filmmaker Babeth Mondini-Vanloo filmed him up close.

Chantal Akerman is omnipresent in Brussels this spring with a retrospective at Bozar and her entire oeuvre on display at CINEMATEK. The short film is an intimate portrait of a young woman who, during her day-to-day routines, reflects on her family, sex life, and body.

De binnenplaatsen van Łódź, een alomtegenwoordig architectonisch element van de stad, zijn de kinderspeelplaatsen van de omliggende flatgebouwen. Podwórka is zowel een studie van een specifieke plaats als een evocatie van de vindingrijkheid van de kindertijd.

With her films, pioneering journalist Jocelyne Saab gives exiled warriors and displaced people a voice. Her work is poetic but also has a strong awareness of her subjective role as a documentary filmmaker.

A group of children meets at the Sirkhane Darkroom Workshop for analogue photography. Asli Baykal delicately records their apparently carefree days while learning about the mysteries of the art form.

Now Pretend is an experimental investigation into using race as an arbitrary signifier. Drawing on language, personal memories, and the 1959 text “Black Like Me”, it deals with Lacan’s mirror stage, and the movement from object to subject. 

In Wild Plants of Palestine, artist and researcher Alaa Abu Asad questions the territorial extension of what is meant by “Palestinian”, while documenting the flora and topographical features of the (postcolonial) landscape in the West Bank.

Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, who passed away in 2015, has gained worldwide fame. Nothing is quiet about her first short film, Blow Up My Town (1968). Her character is abrupt, energetic, and explosive. Something is teetering. This short film is a visionary prelude to the filmmaker’s oeuvre and life.

In his work, Georgian Mikheil Kobakhidze often opposed Soviet ideology. At first glance, Umbrella seems feathery light: a railway worker lives happily with his lover until an umbrella comes flying and gives the realistic a surreal touch.

Su Friedrich, a pioneer in American avant-garde cinema, writes, directs, and edits all her films. These are often a mix of the personal and political, ranging from home movies to video interviews and more classic narratives.    

Barbara Hammer is a pioneer in lesbian cinema. In her over fifty-year career, she has made both classic and more experimental films in which gender roles and female relationships are central.

During his heyday, Buster Keaton was known as The Great Stone Face: the American comedian is best known for silent films focusing on physical comedy and his dry facial expressions.

American underground artist George Kuchar is known for his low-fi aesthetic. He has directed over two hundred films and videos. Hold Me While I'm Naked reached 52nd place in The Village Voice’s Critic's Poll in 2000.

Fool’s Mate, seen by some historians as one of the first films of the French New Wave movement, is perhaps Rivette's best-known short film—and with good reason: its tight camera work captures a mysterious romance.

In A Kind of Testament, a young woman bumps into online animations that are clearly made from her private selfies. Vuillemin’s razor-sharp animated film scrutinises social media and digital personas and asks important questions about privacy and voyeurism.

In the short silent film Return to Reason, American dadaist Man Ray filmed barely recognisable night scenes in Paris. The almost total abstractions, such as enigmatic photograms and conglomerations of spiraling or spinning objects, seem devoid of meaning or purpose.

Set in the deindustrialised mining city of Genk, Terril depicts the masculine dynamics within a working-class family. It patiently moves between these social codes and the landscape in which they manifest themselves.

The footage in this rare film by legendary filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali was shot by a French news team, after which Abu Ali edited it into one of the earliest films about the occupied territory in Gaza.

In deze surrealistische film van Henri Storck koopt een jongeman een glazen oog dat hij via de post verstuurt. Op een bijzondere manier komen erotiek en maatschappijkritiek erin samen.

In Hus, Inger-Lise Hansen attempts to reveal the private layers of our lives through stop-motion and time-lapse photography. Each shot of the film opens on a hidden part of a house and exposes it to the passing light.

The Octopus is a cinematic masterpiece that was restored in 2020. As a historical document, it not only depicts an utterly fascinating creature in all its splendour and mystery but also displays the infinite possibilities of the medium of film.

Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid took inspiration from surrealist films like Un chien andalou and L'Age d'Or by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel for their own avant-garde short film—even though they repeatedly denied it themselves. Following a similar dream logic, Meshes of the Afternoon tells a circular story about a dreaming woman.

Scorpio Rising is perhaps Kenneth Anger's best-known work. Set to the beats of 1960s pop music, the film follows a group of bikers and explores the occult, homosexuality, and Nazism. It also idolises rebellious public figures such as James Dean and Marlon Brando.

In 45th Parallel, a monologue is performed in a building on a borderline. Lawrence Abu Hamdan intelligently exposes the absurdity of borders and the often hypocritical legislation around them.

Irani Bag is a split-screen video essay that questions the alleged innocence of handbags in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. In doing so, Maryam Tafakory provides a robust political analysis of censorship and intimacy. 

This French short film is highly regarded in many film history books. Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel wrote his first feat together with Salvador Dalí, based on their dreams.

On May 27th, 2019, Paul Shemisi and Nizar Saleh, half of the Belgian-Congolese film collective Collectif Faire-Part, landed at Luanda airport in Angola. Despite a scheduled connecting flight, the duo will only take off again two days later to continue their journey to Frankfurt.

Hungarian Flóra Anna Buda won no less than three major film awards (in Cannes, Annecy, and Sarajevo) with her dreamy short animation film 27. It is a story about a young woman exploring her sexuality to her heart's content: lurking in the background is a socio-political message about the soured housing market in France.

Dream of Silk was banned from screening in Iran. In the film, Nahid Rezaei returns to the high school she attended as a young woman twenty years ago, to talk to the young students. She asks them about their hopes for the future and their vision of an ideal life.

Parviz Kimiavi is one of the most prominent figures of 20th-century Persian cinema. In his documentaries, he highlights various subjects in an often poetic and impressionistic way. In P Like Pelican, an old hermit in a slum wants to teach the alphabet to the street children who often come to play in his neighbourhood.

Brussels-based filmmakers Elie Maissin and Mieriën Coppens often collaborate with the collective La Voix des Sans Papiers. In doing so, the duo gives a voice to those without documents. Their understated film language evokes diverse ways of communicating: in different spoken languages, with the silent language of the body, with an environment.

American filmmaker Robert Breer first experimented with rotoscoping in Gulls and Buoys, although by 1972, the technique was already considered outdated. The film is reminiscent of an abstract holiday video on the beach.

The mystery of the filmmaking process is a crucial element in Robert Beavers' artistic signature. Winged Dialogue is characteristic of many of his films: at once lyrical and rigorous, sensual and complex. Mediterranean cities, landscapes, and cultural traditions unveil deeper personal and aesthetic themes. The sexuality of the body and the purity of the soul come together glowingly.

Nocturnal Butterflies is the only film entirely made in Servaisgraphy, a technique that fuses live-action and animation. The late Raoul Servais, a key figure in the history of Belgian animation, already experimented with this style in his film Harpya.

Using a typical American family car, avant-garde queer filmmaker Su Friedrich tells the story of a love affair and its demise. Here, the old, beige station wagon with faux wood panelling is the vehicle of an atypical lesbian couple. When their relationship ends, the vehicle becomes the property of one of them and curses the existence of the other.

Harry Kramer dances his way through an industrial landscape to the rhythm of groovy jazz music. Filmed and edited in a clever but alienating way, slowly but surely, the urban setting and the impact of a dizzying and all-consuming metropolis take over.

In a mix of documentary and fiction, Emotional Architecture 1959 explores several Madrid neighbourhoods in the wake of Sebas and Andrea, two literature and philosophy students who fall in love during the 1958-59 academic year. Their love affair is marked by differences in social class and in outlook on life.

Like fellow filmmakers Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, French director Bruno Muel belonged to the militant Medvedkine, a group of socially engaged filmmakers active between 1967 and 1974. In Septembre Chilien, a documentary about the 1973 coup, he mixes official footage with clandestine shots of the rising opposition.

A documentary film about AIDS and one unconventional woman’s efforts to educate her small, Southern community. DiAna DiAna is a local hairdresser who transformed her beauty parlor into a center for AIDS and safe sex information.

Following a premonition, a young woman tries to persuade her fiancé not to go out to sea in his fishing boat, but the boy ignores her and sets out. Soon, a storm occurs, and the girl frantically tries to find out his fate.

A dreamlike meditation on art and politics in the final years of the Cold War.

A child's voice recites Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky while various objects, such as toys and dolls, fall apart and depict some of the scenes.

A man finds himself haunted by a mysterious black tower in London that appears to follow him wherever he goes.

In a world where everything is forbidden except what is obligatory, a man recalls for what reasons he came to work in a very strange fast food restaurant.

A psychedelic meditation on the filmmaker's life and his detention in a prison in Italy in 1972.

A detailed account of a failed bank robbery. A single take where over ninety people perform a meticulous choreography for the camera. The film recreates an actual event that took place in Stockholm in June 2006.

Fifty-nine-year-old factory worker Beryl is totally obsessed with drawing, and her fixation dominates the entire household. Apart from her husband, her model and muse, every member of the family is addicted to something.

Time travel, still images, a past, present and future and the aftermath of World War III. The tale of a man, a slave, sent back and forth, in and out of time, to find a solution to the world’s fate.

African migrants in Paris talk about everyday life and racism on the labour and housing markets.

As a young Chinese filmmaker returns to his hometown in search for himself, a long due conversation with his mother dives the two of them into a quest for acceptance and love.

A portrait of a leper colony in the north of Iran, where 'ugliness' is juxtaposed with religion and gratitude.

A magical fairytale about a cat in a long trenchcoat.

A classic from the oeuvre of one of the comic pioneers of silent cinema.

Filmmaker Nikita Diakur's AI avatar teaches itself how to do a backflip.

Every day, a father and son parachute jump down from their cold cliff-side house to a remote village in the valley to sell the ice cream they make.

Children dance to music under the watchful eye of their teacher. A young girl witnesses the scene and disrupts their ritual.

A father and son take part in a folk race. To win, the boy turns himself into a car tyre. Loosely inspired by the director’s childhood.

Eén maal per jaar mogen de voormalige inwoners van Ma’loul terug keren naar hun door Israël bezette dorp. Tijdens de traditionele picknick documenteert de Palestijns-Belgische filmmaker Michel Khleifi hoe de geschiedenis van deze plek in de herinneringen van de oude generaties en in de verbeelding van hun kinderen verder leeft.

A devastating portrait of the artist's niece, haunted by the abuse she suffered as a child and the passivity of the family members who allowed it to continue.

A Hollywood villa on a sultry summer night. The escort does what he was hired to do and gives his client the illusion he has paid for. “I’ll make you a star”, the customer says, before the tide turns abruptly and the power dynamics are unsettled.

A sensory insight into the life of an Iranian refugee. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, numerous Iranian intellectuals and artists had to flee their beloved country. Many of them settled in Paris and tried to build a new life, often without success.

Udo Kier dies his way through film history. He screams, falls, is dismembered, shot or commits suicide. Again and again his empty gaze, again and again his rigid body.

An adaptation of a play by Aimé Césaire, in which a revolutionary contemplates his life just before dying in a great collective disaster.

A young man approaches some sailors, who eventually turn on him, strip him naked and beat him to death. Subsequently, fireworks explode.