Discoveries from Belgium World Cinema

Filmic essai on different chess methods combined with an adapted sound setting made in collaboration with chess grandmaster Alberic O'Kelly de Galway. Voted for in the Sight & Sound 2022 Greatest Films of All Time poll.

Interweaving family lore, mythology, science fiction, and digital abstraction, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi’s film follows the collaboration between the artist and her mother, Thuyen Hoa, who fled Vietnam after the end of the American War via a near-calamitous sea journey. Oscillating between voices, visual registers, and timescales—was it seven months or seven thousand years?— Into The Violet Belly offers up an image of its multiplicitous structure: a massive digital swarm, tiny avatars of migrating bodies, swimming in an infinite blue.

The surrealist adventures of Urbanus interacting with the world around him.

A film about what it means to be a woman cycling in different countries around the world. When Manon left to cycle from Brussels to Tokyo, she took a camera with her and met other women cyclists along the way. Hear their stories!

A madcap director takes his cast and crew to a location once rumored to be home to a cannibal family, with the plan of shooting an amateur horror film. Scripts and preparation turn out to be completely unnecessary, and chaos soon ensues. But the real madness has yet to begin—because the legend isn’t as far-fetched as they thought. The psychopaths in question are still very much present. In fact, one of them harbors his own ambition to direct horror films and is handed the perfect opportunity on a silver platter.

A fairy flick of a lavishly lecherous and preternaturally avant-garde persuasion. A “sequel” to 1969’s La fée sanguinaire.

Vents Violents is a dialogue with the absence of Belgian Jewish filmmaker Chantal Akerman. The film follows her footsteps along route 3199 in Al-Naqab desert in southern Israel/colonized Palestine, where she filmed scenes that were used in her last film No Home Movie (2015).

Finding the right librettos was not easy, but one month after the end of the First World War, his triptych – the grim tragedy Il tabarro, the lyrical and sensitive Suor Angelica, and the comedy Gianni Schicchi – premiered in New York. Three different eras, three different settings, three different ‘colours’; though for Puccini, it is through the contrasts between them that the unity of the work is revealed. For his second time directing at La Monnaie, Tobias Kratzer preserves the original order of the pieces, while weaving them together to form a narrative whole, like a circle with no end. With a cast of artists from the extended La Monnaie family, Alain Altinoglu is the ideal conductor to meet the daunting challenges posed by this triptych.

In Battir, bastion of the "green resistance" in the West Bank, Ala', Ibrahim and Bara'a are all under 20. The documentary follows their entry into adulthood and their vision of their country. While parents are banking on the new jobs that could be created by local tourism, most young people dream of nothing more than leaving.

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

In a remote village, a little girl befriends a pack of coyotes. But the villagers brutally put an end to this relationship, unaware of the revolution that awaits.

Thirteen-year-old Renée is in class when the news interrupts her lesson that a girl from another class is missing. While her mother worries about the disappearance, Renée is preoccupied with the breakup of her friendship with her former best friend, Lina.

Through audio recordings taken in the field and poetic moving images, the film portrays activists who use food as a tool in their anti-consumerist struggle.

After reading Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, in which the author returns to the working-class village of his childhood, Kumail Syed realised that his life was shaped through a very different experience of class than those around him. Up until that point the filmmaker had denied his background. When he realised that his rejection was an insult to the reality that his parents had experienced, he decided to revisit the neighbourhood of his childhood. Les enfants ont des oreilles bears witness to Syed’s class of origin through the form of a filmed diary. It shows what the working class can represent today through tableaux vivants from the neighbourhood, as well as through the testimonies of the director and his mother, and the people he encountered during his return.

Hubert Durieux is a mild-mannered provincial banker whose orderly life—with an ex-wife, an adoring daughter, and a mistress—gets hilariously upended when he becomes entranced by a free-spirited Roma woman who steals his car and hides in its trunk.

When Malagasy soldiers came back from WWII, they expected De Gaulle to give them independence for fighting along with France against Nazis. Instead, they were asked to return to their indigenous status. They soon became the leaders of an uprising, harshly repressed by the French colonial authorities. The last witnesses tell us about their long months of resistance.

Hubert Durieux is a mild-mannered provincial banker whose orderly life—with an ex-wife, an adoring daughter, and a mistress—gets hilariously upended when he becomes entranced by a free-spirited Roma woman who steals his car and hides in its trunk.

When Malagasy soldiers came back from WWII, they expected De Gaulle to give them independence for fighting along with France against Nazis. Instead, they were asked to return to their indigenous status. They soon became the leaders of an uprising, harshly repressed by the French colonial authorities. The last witnesses tell us about their long months of resistance.

An Experiment in Leisure explores the link between free time and creativity, between leisure and the kind of imaginative contemplation it facilitates.

Combining animation, live action and photogrammetry, this intensely personal document tackles with the universal subject of grief. An audiovisual reflection on the tension between photography and animation, death and digital reality, and the ghostly nature of space.

Altitude Cent Square, in Brussels. William (55) lies, claiming he's waiting for the tram; Béatrice (38) pretends that everything is fine; and Evdokya (75) tries to convince herself that she'll make it. The three of them coexist in the solitude of the night, each facing in their own way the fear of revealing their vulnerabilities.

A still from the Hollywood film Dracula, a small pink spade, and a nursery rhyme are the keys that unlock this enigmatic narrative labyrinth. In Hyaloïde, the Nysts create a "beautiful confusion" of childhood memories, associative games, verbal and visual analogies, metaphorical objects, self-referential humor and poetic metamorphoses. This dreamlike, semiotic voyage through memory, language and representation emerges at the psychological and linguistic origins of narrative: "Once upon a time..." The characters Thérèsa and Codca (played by the Nysts) imagine that one can "pass under the level of the story, insinuate ourselves in the mesh of signs as we were able to when we were children... where the opacity of the image becomes transparent (hyaloid) and lets in the light of a legendary world." This enchanted universe of signs articulates the Nysts' unique system of "writing" through video.

Short film mainly inspired by the Stijn Streuvels novella 'Het leven en dood in den ast' (Life and Death in the Oasthouse).

The movie follows two assassins who need to acquire fingerprints. It's about their love for drugs.

In Brussels, a Chilean man looks for connection, though fear of intimacy may lead him astray.

Awa, a Cameroonian snow groomer operator, assists a determined young migrant in crossing the border between Italy and France. As their journey unfolds, a poignant tale of redemption emerges amidst a canvas of snow and concealed truths.

In a once-harmonious village, young baker Hyacinthe discovers that his destiny is far greater than he ever imagined. On the eve of the annual ball, where he is expected to choose a life partner, he begins to feel a strange, plant-like growth inside him. Fleeing the fear and suspicion of the villagers, Hyacinthe sets off on an extraordinary journey. Along the way, he meets Noé, a carefree and wild faun, who becomes both guide and companion. Together, they will face unexpected challenges. In the heart of their magical adventure, Hyacinthe will learn to embrace his transformation, find true love, and ultimately restore balance to his village. Hyacinthe is a tale of love, acceptance, and the healing power of magic in a world torn apart by fear and ignorance.

Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd continues his powerful political and poetic body of work with this new film, shot in 16mm, which travels through the regions around Ararat along its “inner lines”, to use the military terminology. These parallel routes are also used by messengers and their carrier pigeons to connect communities scattered by conflict.

Animated haiku short film.

A young thug is up to no good.

In Hoppla!, two choreographies by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker are brought together and performed to the music of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók: Mikrokosmos, seven short works for two pianos, and Quatuor no. 4, Bartók’s fourth string quartet. The reading room of the Ghent University library, designed by the renowned architect Henry Van de Velde, serves as location.

Today is the 167th annual Shedding, a cheerful ceremony that brings all generations together to promote ideological renewal. This year, Ben and her parents will experience it first hand.

Evert and his father Mark lost Rita to an incurable disease a year ago. The grieving process is difficult and an inexplicable fatigue overtakes Mark. There is something ominous in the family home, something that gradually but surely takes control.

Issa and his friends want to make a film about bullying. Their limited knowledge of the subject is leading them down the wrong path. Their friend Maïmouna, a young feminist filmmaker, tries to help them get back on track.

Anna stumbles out of a club after a night out, just missing her bus home. As the sun begins to rise, she wanders through the streets of London and comes across a church. Almost without meaning to, she steps inside. In the stillness of the empty space, memories of her grandmother and the people she left behind flood her mind. She finds herself wondering what her life would have been like if she had never left home.

Once upon a time, there was a little mouse who worked relentlessly to achieve a single goal: becoming somebody. Driven only by her ambition, she slowly became mean and arrogant, pushing away everyone else. Until one day, she accepted a job offer from the most prolific toymaker in the world: Santa Claus. The little mouse was about to find out that climbing the corporate ladder was not all that she hoped it would be…

Two young men are seduced by online influencers with toxic ideas about masculinity.

Jamal Hindawi, a 50-year-old Palestinian, lives with his family in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, where he makes political theatre. Together with a group of friends, he is working on a play that tells the story of an old jacket that symbolises the Palestinian identity. One day, after rehearsals, Jamal goes into the mountains with his friend Zreik, and on the way there he loses the jacket on a bus. A journey unfolds that takes Jamal from the mountains through Beirut, a city in radical transition, where successive crises and protests have left deep scars.

Through a distortion of reality Nova is joined by her partners. Their bodies intertwine, flowing into each other until they become an unrecognizable organic mass.

Boring work leads parliament employees (both elected and otherwise) to play childish power games. When removed from the weight of their historic surroundings, they question their desires and are set free.

Carl de Keyzer, member of the prestigious Magnum agency, shares with us his doubts and questions as he carries out his major project “Before the Flood” on the rise of the sea and its effect on the coast. His professional wandering becomes almost metaphysical, with the threat of an invisible phenomenon is redoubled by the loneliness and family sacrifices that plague him. The omnipresent sea then becomes his personal "tartar desert", where he waits to capture the right image.

About Belgian state railways.

A central city is torn between the preparations for a major event - the Cycling World Cup - and being held hostage by COVID-19. Like a contemporary chronicler, director Lode Desmet films his city during a period that was unprecedented for everyone. He sees Leuven and the people of Leuven changing during the corona crisis, streets empty and full again, hopes and plans come and go.

From a fixed point of view, we witness a tense bus ride in Brussels, when Samuel - a Congolese immigrant - gets on to voice his discontent with Europe.

In a ghost town as if from the past, the night is suspended. The dream world unfolds and reveals mysterious and poetic characters. In this futuristic city where the sun never rises, revolt is at hand.