Launch Kortfilm.be 3.0
As the leading online platform for (Belgian) short films, Kortfilm.be has contributed to developing a profound film culture in Flanders and Brussels since 1999, focusing on film as an art form and short film as a medium in its own right.
On October 15th, 2022, Kortfilm.be will enter a new (bilingual!) phase. In addition to texts and viewing tips, the platform will offer its curated video-on-demand selection, with room for fiction and non-fiction, animation and video art, experiments and crossovers—with a specific focus on recent and retrospective Belgian shorts as the backbone of the catalogue. Each Belgian short film will be presented with a contextualising, thought-provoking essay and paired with a (thematically, formally, or otherwise) complementary short film chosen by a guest curator from the international industry.
Kicking off the short film weekend at Film Fest Gent, we celebrate the revamped Kortfilm.be by doing what we love most: watching shorts. Exceptionally, we screen the four short films that launch Kortfilm.be's VOD catalogue on the big screen one more time.
Afterwards, we host the Film Fest Gent Talkie: International Short Film Competition at the Festival Café at 12h30. A chat with Belgian filmmakers Enzo Smits, Isabelle Tollenaere, Meltse Van Coillie and Harm Dens, moderated by Bo Alfaro Decreton.
With the support of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) of the government of Flanders, and Film Fest Gent.
Programme
Programma
A large and anxious crowd prevails in this chilling black-and-white short film, shot with one camera in Pristina, Kosovo, in 2015. Intimate, emotional and sometimes violent moments of farewell: men, women and children leave their homes for an (unknown) future as migrants.
Monstrous cranes and prehistoric flying reptiles dominate an inhospitable seaport. Only a lonesome angler is tolerated there as a human being. He becomes a witness to an eccentric idyll between a cabin boy and a mermaid. Dream or reality?
A film about highways, tourists, concrete picnic tables, lukewarm melons and carwashes. About a man who wants to leave and a child who stops him. A summer movie.
A ship drifts in the middle of an endless sea. Aboard we find a crew of five: three Dutchmen and two Filipino sailors. They all cope with boredom - some by trying to overpower it; others by escaping into a parallel world, guided by dreams.