Screening

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Two teenage girls from Brussels flee to Paris and try to survive there.

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.

Large parts of Goma were covered with lava after the eruption of the Nyiragongo volcano in January 2002. Today kids live in the ruins on the lava. They sell paper hankies to grown-ups in the city, and lava rocks to construction builders.

A trip to the Côte d'Azur, with its blue skies, beaches and endless sunbathing people.

A collage about mortality by Stan Brakhage, one of the most prominent figures of experimental film of the 20th century.

La briglia sul collo (1974) is a wonderful example of Cecilia Mangini's talent for pointed observation combined with humor and social criticism.

Surrounded by the sound of nocturnal animals, a girl falls into a deep sleep. Gradually we slip into her dream that takes us on a cosmic journey through the meadows of Erpe-Mere.

A sleeping man dreams of a city at dusk. Or is the city dreaming of him?

Jean Vigo's very first film. The silent documentary shows Nice residents in their daily routines, and the prevailing social inequalities.

In Dominique Loreau's very first (short) film, a woman wanders the streets of Brussels, waiting to leave for the tropics with a man she happened to meet in a pub.

A recently retired father invites his son to help him with the cherry picking in the garden. The father is in no hurry to finish the cherry job though, as he tries to catch up with his son. The cherries remain in the background.