Discoveries from Belgium World Cinema

When the catering of a film set has canceled, one of the runners is burdened with the task of fixing lunch against impossible odds.

Short film set in Brussels.

The world is coming to an end, but are you ready? From catching your own food to building a tent or even starting a colony on Mars, join Henk Rijckaert as he discovers whether you’d survive the apocalypse… or go down laughing

On holiday by the sea in November, I'm struck by loneliness in an out-of-season Banyuls-sur-Mer. A very handsome actor friend arrives to rehearse the dialogue for his next film.

In post-revolution Tunisia, this captivating documentary offers a poetic exploration of a nation's journey from dictatorship to democracy, capturing its struggles, hopes, and resilient spirit.

Kamal Kharmach is responsible for the year-end conference for the third time. Sit down for a witty, sharp and hilarious look back at 2021.

Michael Myers, Carrie, Jason, Chucky, Damien the Curse, Ghostface and Freddy all live together. Unfortunately, it's Halloween night : will this lovely roommate of serial killers go awry, with Myers deciding to clean house as usual on this special day ?

Nicolas and Victor are 12-year-old twins who, despite their different characters, have a unique connection. At school, however, their differences cause problems that make them drift apart.

The theme of this film is the children's view on the destruction of a working-class area. The loss, for them of the dilapidated alleyways and waste ground where they met up and played. Their anger, their futile revolt against the demolition workers only serve to confirm their powerlessness and status as social outcasts.

Alice, a young woman grieving the death of her mother, finds a friend in the older Ida, but her new friend seems to have sinister intentions.

Tiho, Maiya and Anthony bear the consequences of the lack of psychological help every day. Anna, their young sister, experiences the effects of their suffering.

PROJECT#10 - A HORIZON is an attempt to create, while clearing the mind of obstructions and merely trusting the unknown. Trying to overrule distortion and to rise above the unnecessary noise, longing for a new paradigm; a contemporary way of understanding the whole and each other. Breaking through prevailing conditioning that limits the exploration of what we no longer perceive and desperately seek to re-establish.

In this surrealist piece of avant-garde generation of Belgian cinema, French masked master of crime Fantômas travels through the world seeking his beloved Elvire. He destroys all decency in his trip, as a great mischief-maker.

Riko Tik used to be bullied as a kid, now he want revenge. He falsifies the book of the Sint so that it looks like all the kids have been naughty this year. Disguised as king Kabberdas he goes to the house of the Sint to fool the holy man with the wrong book.

"In Loving Memory of Fleeting Light" is a hybrid documentary that follows a mother and daughter on a journey to find memories of fireflies that were once abundant in rural areas of Northern Italy. The ecological loss of these creatures makes them reflect upon other types of mourning: within the family and the village at large.

Sexual abuses, mental manipulation and embezzlement: Tibetan Buddhism is shaken by serious scandals. An in-depth account that lifts the veil on the unspiritual underbelly of a religion venerated in Europe.

Guy, 55 year-old taxi driver, is about to travel with the Eurostar, for the first time of his life : his daughter is getting married. But when he parks to take the train, he discovers concealed in his suitcase, a 7 year-old girl who's from Kinshasa. This is Maïssa. Her demand is clear and non-negotiable : Guy must take her with him to London, in his suitcase.

A short look into the life of a loving girl with an abusive mother and a father who stands by during his wife's frequent fits of violence.

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.

Jules and Juliette go to the beach. They carry the dinghy on their heads with which they intend to sail. It's already quite a deal. Of course, Jules is clumsy and doesn't fail to play the fool. The beach is deserted. It's going to be a bright day full of laughter and connivance.

The border between Lithuania and Belarus used to be a fluid border between Soviet republics. Today it is one of Europe's forgotten outskirts, with the Schengen fence dividing communities, families and lives.

Joachim, a teenager wins entrances for Spa. He goes to with his mother who seems worn out by a night of alcohol. While he meets a young girl, his mother gets lost going away further from her son.

Investigation by the Museum of Walloon Life showing the different stages of the manufacture of rifle barrels using the so-called "Damascus" process, in Nessonvaux in 1925 and 1931

A small and intimate comedy special by Xander De Rycke, performed between Christmas and New Years Eve 2022 at De Centrale, Ghent.

In the middle of the night Lea knocks on the door of her brother's flat. Elie, disturbed, wonders what made his sister travel all the way from Lebanon to Belgium. Only in a phone conversation will he learn that his sister is pregnant, and the father of the child is Muslim. Their Christian family refuses to accept this "disgrace", demanding that Elie restore the family honor.

Lula dreams of being a professional hip hop dancer. This is her way of forgetting her absent father and strict mother.

It's sports day and a seventeen-year-old boy prepares to compete, as he has many times before. Only this time it's different, his childhood is behind him, different feelings, emotions and desires engulf him as he watches his classmates. His life is about to change.

In The Green Line, for which the axiom was ‘sometimes the political is poetic, sometimes the poetic is political’, Alÿs walks holding a punctured can of dribbling green paint along the contested width of the so-called Green Line established between Israel and its neighbours following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. In formal terms, The Green Line is a reenactment of an earlier work, The Leak (1996), in which the artist took a can dribbling blue paint for a walk and installed the empty container in the gallery. By recontextualising The Leak in geopolitical terms, Alÿs relocates the tensions in the work from those formal ideas of action and painting to questions of maps and territories and who has the right to live where.

One of the most intimate and obstinate filmmakers in Belgium, Boris Lehman acts, directs, produces, and distributes his films, single-handedly incarnating the essence of a creator who manages to survive on the fringes of his industry. From Brussels to Paris, friends, filmmakers and critics offer their understanding of a man for whom life is a reason to film, and film, a reason to live.

During one week, Marion and Patrick will take Mathis in, who has just been evicted from a youth center. His presence will make Marion ask herself what she wants and what are her boundaries at work as well as in her love life with Patrick.

Echoing the title of its precursor film, Un Âne—“a donkey” in French–, [anan] refers to the phonetic sound of the word “cloud” in Hebrew. The film moves through route 3199 in the Negev desert in southern Israel/colonised Palestine—a route followed and filmed by renowned filmmaker Chantal Akerman around her untimely death in 2015. A work invested in an attempt to mourn Akerman in a time of ravaging genocide that creates an inter-generational trauma. A reckoning with the blind spot of European Jewry towards the settler colonisation of Palestine by Zionism and the ongoing Nakba.

To celebrate the end of the year, the team of the fictional police attends a spectacular team building where they learn how to think as criminals and participate in an orchestrated bank heist.

Members of indie pop band Balthazar reunite after the COVID-19 lockdown to record a new album inside an ancient castle.

A 3rd short super 8 film made by Chantal Akerman in Knokke to be used to be accepted at INSAS starring her friends her mother and herself.

Political film essay in which events happening around the Mediterranean Sea are compared to the myth of Icarus.

A young man leaves his home. He just broke up with his girlfriend. He's 27 years old and realizes that the older he gets, the less he can take it. When he walks through a busy shopping street to run errands, he is constantly approached by people who want something from him. He always responds in a very unpredictable way...

A group of children from Brussels brings a thrilling adventure to life during a film workshop in the form of an animated movie. Spiderman and his gang have a cunning plan: to stage a fake disaster to distract the police so they can steal without interference. Everything seems to go according to plan until the police track them down in an abandoned chewing gum factory, shattering their dream.

Paul and his wife, Maria, run a pig farm. When Maria's sister, Helena, moves in, Paul falls deeply in love with her, only to be rejected. Seeking an escape from the tension, Helena confides in her sister before leaving the farm to live with a friend. Soon after, a devastating outbreak of swine fever hits the farm, pushing the business to the brink of ruin, yet unexpectedly drawing Paul and Maria closer together. However, when Helena returns, Paul renews his advances—and this time, she gives in. As Maria is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and ultimately passes away, Paul is left with a devastating realization: despite having Helena by his side, profound loneliness will consume the rest of his days.

A vertical thriller shortfilm about a man who discovers morsecode in the rain.

The father through the eye of the son, the painter through the eye of the filmmaker. Started at random 10 years ago, the picture rewrites in a very subjective way the life of Roger Gobron - born in 1899 in Brussels - who, through his pictorial research, succeeded in giving watercolors a new dimension. "In Belgium, artists are evaluated according to the price of their paintings", A tribute to this simple and generous man who searched and painted watercolors his whole life.

Between dust, sweat and oil tanks, Mara and Baptiste share a brief romance. A story in the middle of nowhere going nowhere.

Apprentice filmmaker, Juan makes a documentary portrait of Coco, a thirty-something-year-old marginal. The film is quickly called into question when Juan discovers that Coco thinks she’s a fairy in a disenchanted society.

The history of barbed wire, whose use dates back to the first settlers of the Wild West, always driven by their reckless and ruthless spirit of conquest and selfish ambition to leave their mark on wild lands; of its relationship with politics and mercantilism; of the perversion of the millenary relationship between men and animals; of the evolution of surveillance techniques. Fences and borders: the tragic tale of the enclosure of the world.

If you're feeling down and you don't really know why. If you want to have a good laugh. If you don't understand much about the world, and even less about people. If you don't get what you think you deserve because they don't see you, the idiots. If you can count on one hand the number of times you've felt free and carefree in the past year. If you want to smash things but don't dare.

First days of spring, Max and Tim spend a last weekend at their grandmother's house. They gather their things before moving. It is time to say goodbye to memories. In the sky, a shadow approaches the sun.

AI: African Intelligence explores the contact zones between African rituals of possession within traditional fishing villages of the Atlantic coast of Senegal and the emergence of new technological frontiers known as Artificial Intelligence. Considering the confluence of tradition and modernity, Diawara questions how we could move from disembodied machines towards a more humane and spiritual control of algorithms. Could Africa be the context of emergence for such improbable algorithms?

Test 1 is a hand-painted abstract 16mm film with live sound performance. The sound comes from self-built devices that transfer light into the sound, as well as electro-magnetic waves into the sound.

Yard One shows fragments of people navigating the city of Brussels through dreams, family and community. It's a tribute to its rich electronic music scene and a glimpse of how the sound system functions in today's world. It's a voice for the people. A stand. A vision. A mission.

Fei dreams back to her childhood in the great outdoors with her grandfather and horse. Unexpectedly, her pendant given to her by her grandfather is stolen by an unknown kung fu master. Fei questions the real meaning behind the pendant.

The New Saint is a film about Yevgeny Rodionov, an ordinary young Russian boy who fell in the first Chechen war after being taken prisoner and refusing to convert to Islam. He was proclaimed a martyr and many Russians found in Yevgeny their own unofficial saint. The life of Yevgeny’s mother underwent a radical change when her child ‘became’ a saint. By campaigning for his canonisation she keeps the memory of her son alive. The success of her mission is illustrated by the portrayal of Yevgeny’s image on icons throughout the country. Who is this holy soldier exactly and what makes him the perfect icon of Russia today?

Lia, a Belgian-Rwandan basketball player facing the twilight of her career. Twenty years after fleeing the genocide, she is asked to join the Rwandan national basketball team. This journey stirs buried memories of a painful past: exile, family silences and the pain of a fractured identity. Through her eyes, the film explores confrontation between memory and the present, and a nation scarred by tragedy with a contemporary Rwanda brimming with life and creativity.