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Eva Giolo’s films are marked by a rhythmic quality attuned to the push and pull of the monumental and the ordinary, the mythical and the everyday. In Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths, Giolo turns her camera to the Italian ski area Val Gardena, nestled in the valleys surrounding the Dolomites, where she evades a touristic image and instead captures isolated moments in nature with her characteristic 16mm Bolex camera.

“There’s a reason why everybody hates Batman in those movies,” comments one of the titular protagonists in Omar Chowdhury’s BAN♡ITS. Set in a liminal space between Bangladesh and India, the film follows a group of self-proclaimed “destitutes” who rob the rich to give to the poor and are obsessed with Heath Ledger, because “he died for his art.” Inhabiting a lawless limbo where radical credos coexist with state-sanctioned anarchic stances these outlaws are as porous and opaque as Chowdhury’s film itself. 

Over the past few years, Hoda Taheri (Tehran, 1992) has toured many a film festival with her short films Mother Prays All Day Long (2022), As If Mother Cried That Night (2023), and Mother is a Natural Sinner (2024), the first of which you can watch via Kortfilm.be’s video-on-demand catalogue. In this “mother trilogy”, Taheri zooms in on relevant issues such as the right to abortion and the treatment of refugees in Europe. She takes on the lead role herself, cunningly and humorously dramatising her own biography. 

Diego Quinderé de Carvalho’s 0.2 Milligrams of Gold and Andrés Jurado’s Yarokamena invite us to reconsider our relationship with nature, history, and the systems that shape our lives. In conversation, both filmmakers talk about their filmmaking process and the question of activism in art.

The camera measures distances. Its focal point coincides with an object in the room and through the emptiness around it, something becomes visible. It is an obvious observation, yet this essential aspect of photography is important in the work of Chloë Delanghe. Her work is situated on the crossroads between intimacy and distance.

Through association, repetition, and accumulation, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller showcase the inventory of Hollywood formal clichés that contributed to the creation of the Twin Towers’ symbolic capital, reflecting at the same time on the power of those images to haunt our collective imagination to this day.

Portrait d’une paresseuse seems one of Chantal Akerman’s more playful and lighter works—a skit in which she acts out a filmmaker’s creative process of attempting (and failing) to make a film about being lazy.

Lounging on a small bed, Chantal Akerman’s posture seems casual and relaxed at first glance, but the repetitive tilts of her head—to the left and then back to center—contrasting with the smooth glide of the camera suggest otherwise. Restlessness is in the air, yet before we can discern it, the image is already on the move, retracing its steps for a second time.

Greek filmmaker Jacqueline Lentzou does not look for inspiration; inspiration finds her. In her artistic practice, vague ideas slowly develop into something more comprehensible, more tactile. In The End of Suffering (A Proposal), she renders the mere act of “understanding” palpable.