Discoveries from Belgium World Cinema

At a place where nothing stays for long, an inconspicuous desk clerk turns lost items into meaningful moments. A poetical animation about pausing and connecting in a helter-skelter world.

7-year-old Mia tries to liberate her overworked mother from the clutches of an overpopulated metropolis. In her quest, she unlocks the hidden secrets that make the world turn.

A dynamic, contemporary dance performance about how it is impossible to explain your deepest wishes or desires... how these can only be expressed in dreams and sleep. In the final sequence, we see the importance of effort and hope in the dancers' attempt to escape gravity. The all-male company performs to the music of David Byrne.

Director and visual artist Romeo Castellucci will tackle this mythological material and project his visions over the course of the journey performed by the characters, representing concretely such key elements of the Ring as water and fire. This symbolic reading will concentrate on essential aspects of the libretto, inviting spectators to forge their own interpretation. Avoiding irony, Castellucci will treat each protagonist with equal importance, highlighting the aspirations, emotions and thoughts that animate them: absolute love and the conquest of power.

Manon daydreams about the new customer in her aunt's hair salon. She must be a sea-queen, listening to the heartbeat of her violet whale.

A married woman visits an old house with a real estate agent. This event sends her into a world of obsession, and she ends up losing her mind.

Northern Vietnam early 1970s, yearning for their mother, Lộc and Tiên flee the evacuated area to return to Hanoi, in search of a family reunion.

Louis made his fortune selling candy, but no one buys them anymore. He steals grandpa's love serum to put in his candy which can turn people into devoted slaves. Mega Mindy has to stop him before it's too late..

Despite the risks, Polina crossed Europe to recover her daughter. Upon arriving in Belgium, gun in hand, she discovered a peaceful family, a loving father, and a well-behaved daughter. Uneasy, will Polina be able to continue trusting her intuition?

Three women fall in love with the same man, except it's a mother and her two daughters aged sixteen and seven. Through love, these women will learn to overcome their deepest fears, come to terms with the way others see them, and simply love.

Stage registration of the sixteenth show by the Flemish cabaret duo Kommil Foo. 'Schoft' is, once again, a show about the human condition. About mankind who tries to hold his own, but inevitably stumbles and falls. Time and again man will scramble up, only to fall again later. A laughable, but also comforting thought.

It's Plop's birthday and that, of course, has to be celebrated. Kwebbel, Klus and Lui send Plop into the woods for a long, relaxing walk so they can prepare the party in the meanwhile. But won't Kwebbel talk too much? Can Lui stay awake long enough to help? And won't Klus' new invention cause problems? Let's hope it all goes well..

Esmeray : artist, transsexual, Kurd, feminist, currently lives in Turkey. First, we filmed her as she walked the streets of Istanbul at night – her territory. Then, we asked her, for a short while, to slip back into the skin, or at least the costume, of the man she stopped being 20 years ago. In this guise, she followed the same routes. The two pictures are shown simultaneously. The film becomes like an experiment in self-shadowing. Split screen as an exploration of split personality ?

The Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach are considered “the Himalayas of violinists". Yehudi Menuhin first recorded the complete works mid-1930s. The film, focuses on the Sonatas. It is a true dialogue between the recording of Yehudi Menuhin and Claire Bourdet, playing them today. The different movements are played in turn until they are merged into an unexpected polyphony. This is a film about music as an image of time.

The film “Dear Gerald” is conceived as a response to an online review of one of the home movies from Jasper Rigoles IICADOM archive. This archive is created by the filmmaker as an attempt to preserve orphaned films sourced from flea markets in and around Belgium. The film starts as a reflection on the medium of the home movie and the nature of the archive but slowly reveals problematic side effects of publishing private images. In that sense the film raises questions on authorship and consent in an online environment.

In the snowy and desolate roads of South Eastern Anatolia, Musa, an old refugee, carries the corpse of his deceased wife to their homeland with his granddaughter, Halime. Their journey becomes more difficult as they get closer to the border of a country at war. Once they get caught up by the police, their ways separate in three different destinations.

Robinson is a doctor and unlike Robinson Crusoe, his solitude is voluntary but his island in the Mediterranean Sea is invaded by migrants, NGOs, guards. Friday is a castaway, the only one from his boat to have survived when sailing from Africa to Italy. During his strolls on the island, Robinson confronts his own solitude by keeping a diary - that works like augmented reality - filled with extraordinary beings and events, which both fill and trouble his daily life.

In Brussels, Zoé and Ota, two young dancers from different worlds, are unexpectedly paired during a casting call. What starts as a thorny mess of clashing egos eventually blurs into love.

Everyone knows Toots Thielemans, the musician who won the world over with his harmonica, his unique smile and his famous song “Bluesette”. Yet few know who he really is. His life is extraordinary – from his childhood in the Marolles, a working-class neighbourhood in Brussels, to the full house at Carnegie Hall in New York at the age of 84 in 2006.

A piece of dance theatre conceived and choreographed by Alain Platel for his company Les Ballets C de la B (Les Ballets Contemporains de la Belgique). Platel was in the process of developing the work when he learnt of the death of the German choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch and was so moved that he offered it as a posthumous gift to Pina.

Mega Mindy, Grandpa and Grandma Fonkel, and Toby must solve the mystery of the sparkling emerald. There is a strange unknown man who wants to pay a lot of money for a painting that Grandma bought at the flea market. Grandma doesn't want to sell the painting, but then the candy store is broken into and Grandpa suddenly starts acting very strangely. When a new police officer unexpectedly starts working at the police station and more and more strange things happen, it's time for Mega Mindy to take action.

In the distant future, Brussels is the last habitable place on Earth, thanks to its regular rainfall. The city is flooded, and a thick gray sky forms an increasingly impenetrable lid over it. Transformed into a vat and now overrun by wild beer yeast, Brussels is beginning to ferment. Faced with this threat, a group of residents is tasked with devising a strategy.

A journey between hope and dystopia in a hallucinated Kinshasa, from the culture of the hair salon to futuristic solitary clubbing, from an urban parade to a dictator's sense of glory to a modern western in the style of Takeshi Kitano.

A comedy short in which a young woman has her clothes stolen at the beach, and needs to get hold of something to cover herself without being seen.

This film tells the story of BRUNO, a man in virtual prison, controlled by an electric bracelet, caught in the paradoxes of an apparent freedom of 2km².

Portugal managed to get through all of World War II without firing a single shot. Caught in a vise between the Axis and the Allies, Antonio Salazar, the country’s strongman, used every trick in the book to get his country through unscathed. In this war of nerves in which anything went, the Portuguese dictator took brilliant advantage of the only weapon available to maintain his country’s independence: neutrality.

“The Making of Justice” is a movie about seven prisoners working on the scenario for a crime film together with Sarah Vanhee. Like the main character in the film they are making up, they are all guilty of murder. To shape the story, they draw on their own experiences, ideas and desires. We, the viewers, can only guess whether they are using fiction as a means of confirming, transcending or transforming their present situation.

End-of-year conference in which Kamal fillets 2020.

The story of a dysfunctional family in a miserable butcher shop.

61 years after his assassination, Patrice Lumumba returns to his country. "Congo returns to Congo" as one of his children said. Lumumba was a nationalist leader who intended to use his country's enormous wealth for the benefit of his people. He became the first Prime Minister in the history of Congo on June 30, 1960, when the country gained its independence after 80 years of Belgian colonial rule. Seven months later, he was assassinated in Katanga province with two of his best political allies: Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo. Their bodies were dissolved in sulfuric acid and only one of Patrice Lumumba's teeth remained. This "relic" was taken from Lumumba's corpse and kept in secret by a police commissioner until his death in 2000. The assassination of the nationalist and anti-colonialist leader was followed by the advent of the dictator Mobutu, who was able to remain in place until 1997, thanks to Western support.

Where does the feeling of guilt come from? Starting from the account of a medical condition, Farah Hasanbegović resorts to animation to search for the origin of those sensations that accompany us throughout our life, whether we want them to or not. Through eloquent pencil strokes, Ribs is a sensorial meditation on the material dimension of our feelings.

The story focuses on a veteran (the General) who served the military during WWII, Vietnam and the Korean War. He has quite a few alarming conceptions about warfare ("politics are the extension of war", “Civilians are as much the enemy as men in uniform”…) When he returns to his estate in Antwerp, he continues to live under the impression of being in command of his troops and hikes into the nearby woods fully armoured.

In his village, where bread is scarce, Ousseynou, a former fisherman, finds stability by selling stale bread. The opening of his sister-in-law's bakery creates an unspoken tension between them, jeopardising his business and family role.

A lion hunt filmed in 1908 by the aristocrat Hyacinthe Octavie Frédérique Louise Irénée Rolande Pirmez. This is the oldest known film to be shot in Ethopia.

A portrait of Fogo Island, off the Eastern coast of Canada. Giolo approaches the unique environment of the island – human, geological, floral – proposing an indivisibility between landscapes and the bodies that inhabit them. Shot in her distinctly frontal style, a series of 16mm tableaux hint to the relationship between observation and composition, between seeing and dreaming. As someone reads, “a landscape is a state of mind”, or more accurately a “state of mind is a landscape".

The legendary theatershow from 1995 till June 1997!

Five Congolese women testify about their traumatic past, marked by violence. Kidnapped as children because they are of mixed ancestry, robbed of their rights and identity, and abandoned after Congo's independence, they decide to break their silence. They file a complaint against the Belgian state for crimes against humanity.

12 August 2002 is the date which was printed on every shot in this film by the memory of the camera. On that day a huge tower which disrupted the north wing of an abandoned castle was torn down, floor by floor. The film is a record of the methodical disruption of this building by inhuman and all-powerful machines. The voice-over consists of a phone call by the author John Berger (1926), who has written numerous and radical opinion pieces in favour of the people of Palestine.

Betty Van Sevenant, a young resistance fighter from Bruges, arrested in March 1942, was declared "Nacht und Nebel". She recounts her deportation to the Ravensbrück and Mauthausen camps until liberation. Tobias Schiff, a Polish Jew from Antwerp, was deported with his parents to Upper Silesia on August 28, 1942, on convoy No. 25. His story begins upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau and concludes with the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp. (2 x 26 min.)

The daily work of Fabienne Roelants and Christine Watremez, two Brussels anesthesiologists who are among the most renowned specialists in surgical hypnosis.

41 participants explore the echoes of their pasts and futures through film, pouring their dreams into one-shot stories, interviews, and scripted scenes.

Tom is 15 years old. He's staying at his father’s house for the weekend, to spend an oppressive father-and-son moment under the looming shadow of a deceased brother. However, Tom has come with a bottle of Bluestar, a product that exposes blood trails. With his friend Kevin, he wants to visit an abandoned house at night, the one in which a man killed his entire family. This ghastly escapade will take an unexpected turn for Tom: the Bluestar has something to reveal to him.

A teenager adores his sailor friend. He dreams about the exotic countries, marvellous starry skies and the inevitable homesickness that would bring his friend back to him. In a colourful series of mythical referential images, his fragile dreams get so unreal, that the enthusiasm for seeing his friend again turns into anxiousness.

1976. East Beirut. In the midst of the Lebanese civil war, Issam struggles for survival inside the besieged camp of Tell al Zaatar. At just 18, he watches his ideals crumble. Fifty years later, he decides to tell Sarah, his daughter, the story of a siege that lasted fifty-five days.

Alarming election results, a war in Gaza and Ukraine, farmers' protests - Much has already been said and written, but not everything. The year 2024 through the eyes of one of the most innovative comedians of our time.

The year, 1978, in a Catholic school, pupils in detention. Billy is missing from the roll-call. Detention has barely begun, as Billy drops in with some friends. All are armed to the teeth. Billy takes revenge on his classmates for the constant harassment. Morgan, another pupil, still has a reckoning with the senior pastors in connection with sexual abuse.

A Belgian activist group seeks to legalise the composting of human bodies as an ecological alternative to burial, a method not yet legal in Belgium or any other EU country.

Omama, a rural grandmother in Hungary, has one main wish: to not wake up tomorrow. Martin, her cinema-expatriate grandson, comes for a visit, hoping to connect with her before Omama's wish comes true.

Bahoz is 19 years old and lives surrounded by nature and beautiful landscapes. Every day, he goes to the mountains to hunt although he catches very little. But today will be the day that will change his life forever.

Stones are at once the most foundational and the most overlooked parts of our lifeworld. When a retired nature documentary narrator passes a kidney stone, she decides to tell one more story about this forgotten world of stone . A hypnotic essay film asking urgent ecological questions, Apple Cider Vinegar takes the viewer on a journey meeting Palestinian quarry workers, passionate Britisch Geologist and People living on the lava fields of Fogo.

The Congolese-Belgian artist Baloji looks at Congolese pygmy wedding traditions.

Star of the 'Emmanuelle' 70's soft-porn movie franchise, Sylvia Kristel goes from troubled child to being launched into international stardom. Her powerful charisma propels her both to the heights and depths of fame.

During a night out with his friends, Josef is haunted by memories of a drug-fueled near-death experience, spiraling into addiction and self-destruction.

In a broken world, Michel Vay's escape is thwarted by a series of unexpected encounters. Will he be able to take flight?

On the phone, there is Camille. She tries to find what unites her with Johane, who listens to her messages, somewhere in Brussels. If they still love each other, could they find each other again?

Belgian opera film of Wagner's opera.