Discoveries from Belgium World Cinema

In October and November 2017, Xander will be back on stage with a second special about his secret love: the Flemish media landscape. Over the past year, De Rycke has watched just about every Flemish film and TV program. With "Xander De Rycke houdt het voor bekeken" (Xander De Rycke calls it quits), he gives the audience a razor-sharp overview. This fall, Xander will take a close look at everything from September 2016 to September 2017. From strong fiction to weak reality and from blockbusters to box office flops. Nothing has escaped his gaze. His conclusion? You'll have to hear it for yourself on the evening itself. But for now, he's calling it quits.

OUR KANAAL is a journey through the belly of Belgium on Europe's most powerful canal in the age of industrialisation. Guided by the voice of Els Moors, we explore the social ties that bind us, shape us, constitute us and humanise us.

Sor, a survivor in a post-pandemic world, hides in an abandoned building. Facing her own death, a mysterious stranger offers her redemption and a glimmer of hope.

Docu-drama about a youth club which is preparing to make a film on priest Daens and his political socail movement Daensisme.

At the end of August 1914 Leuven became the victim of blind rage war. Virtually the entire city center was systematically destroyed by the Germans. War journalist Rudi Vranckx explains what happened.

Johan Grimonprez transposes an extract from Meg Stuart’s compelling choreography ‘No Longer Ready-Made’ to the anonymous waiting room of a railway station. This colourless space along with nameless travellers provides the excellent setting for Stuart’s hectic and intense convulsions. A train ride along the nightly Brussels northern area supports the vitriolic New York City prose of David Wojnarowicz on the soundtrack.

After years of traveling in a motorhome with her mother, a reserved 11-year-old girl returns to Belgium. There, she faces an unexpected friendship. Can she open her heart, even though goodbye is inevitable?

Residing within the confines of a dimly lit night shop in Brussels, an undocumented Indian immigrant, fondly known as Happy, aspires to provide a bright future for his wife and daughter back home. Yet, the ever-present threat of discovery and his longing for his beloved family inflict fatigue, evoking surreal visions and sounds.

Based in Limburg, racist and corrupt police inspector Koen Devos comes in contact with two immigrant gangsters, bringing not only his but also the life of his colleague Toon in danger.

Terminator Too – The Movie: A selfmade homage to blockbusters .

Afghanistan, summer 2021. As the Taliban gradually seize control of the country, Leila, a young widow, arrives in Kabul. She begins working in a kitchen that she discovers is part of a Bacha Bazi house. Very young, androgynous boys there dance dressed as women before audiences of men. She meets Tamim, a Bacha whom she decides to help. She will try to save other young boys and leave the country before the city falls.

Ana attempts to untangle the painful memories of the night when her marriage began to crumble. Unable to speak, she starts writing. Her diary becomes a letter to her husband about their growing alienation, set in a deafening silence.

A bereft filmmaker asks a series of women to pose nude for his camera in this striking and moody short film by Belgium's Olivier Smolders. The silent encounters act as counterpoint to a contemplative internal monologue musing on love, loss and the subtle power-plays of aversion and desire underway in an atmosphere pervaded by an irresistible erotic gloom. Filmed in a lustrous black and white, the themes explored find their perfect compliment in the stark, fascinated, all-embracing gaze of the camera. - Robert Avila

A documentary film following events after the Egyptian revolution of 2011.

An unknown sailor unravels the mystery of the Black Ponds marshes. People and animals have been disappearing there since time immemorial. Inspired by Jean Ray’s short story of the same name and introduced by Jacques Brel.

Graziano is the sole resident of a deserted mountain village. With his blind dog as his loyal companion, Graziano roams the empty streets, serenades in the abandoned church, and embarks on a quest to reunite with his long-lost love, whose name has faded from his memory.

It's early spring, an eclipse day in Brussels. On the grass, children are playing, teenagers are flirting. In the sky, the moon swallows up the sun and a blue night settles over the city. Hearts are racing. In the park, strange things happen.

On a stormy day, Emillien visits his farmer father. Once there, he discovers an empty dairy farm. The cows have disappeared. His father is missing. There's blood on the farm floor.

While making shopping in her neighborhood with her daughter Nina, Elena receives a phone call that upsets her. A moment of inattention, Nina has disappeared ...

Lilly, a 40-year old politician who fights against immigration, returns to the family house to take care of her elderly mother Hanna who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. During her stay, she discovers a hidden side of her mother’s early history.

David Monacchi, a hi-tech explorer, knows the Amazonian forest well, but his means of exploration are unusual. A sound artist, “field recorder”, and eco-acoustic composer, he understands terrain through sound. For the sound landscape of this region is as rich as the diversity of wildlife that produces it. Today, global warming and humans are threatening species, and sound pollution itself is involved in the extinction of some of these; nature being well constructed, the sound spectrum of the forest is based on a subtle balance, in which each species communicates on a very specific frequency, never interfering with the others. The upheaval caused by man, through the installation of a pipeline for example, upsets this balance.

Rachel Corrie, a young American woman and her friends attempt to stop a bulldozer from clearing out some homes and other buildings. Corrie was run over and killed. Witnesses claim it was deliberate.

About the Walloon teenager who hijacked the bus with schoolchildren in Vielsalm, who had been given the assignment to make a statement on the radio against injustice and inequality. Nowadays he takes care of birds and the wounds on their legs in a quarry. The father turns out to be the man's child. As a seven-year-old he found an injured bird along the road, which he took to class. The teacher told him to take care of it, but when the bird turned out to be a crow, the advice came to kill the animal. But the boy cured the crow and the animal stayed with him for eight years until it died of old age.

From 1996 until today, 33 violent murders are perpetrated during the Halloween period in Belgium by a serial killer who calls himself "the clown". We are on the eve of Halloween. Vincent hates this party and for good reason: his father committed suicide during this period. That morning, he receives a call from his friend Alice to babysit her cats because she has to be away for a few days. On the way, he realizes that he is being chased by a strange, masked man. Very quickly, he realizes that this stranger covered in a clown mask is prowling around Alice's place, determined to enter.

On each side of the border between Lithuania and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, there is an ornithological station that studies the migration of the millions of birds crossing this border region. Today, for the first time, both ornithological stations are trying to cross borders with a joint bird research project. Will they be able to work together?

Visual artist Oscar de Wit interviews Flemish writer Daniël Robberechts in the backroom of his house in Everbeek, Belgium.

A stormy summer night. Lightning strikes the water. A chain reaction begins. Director Emilien Dubuc uses vivid imagery, evocative sound effects and microscopic shots of biochemical experiments to explain in detail how life on Earth is created. But his narrative gradually becomes less scientific and more personal.

Since 2016, Xander De Rycke has been touring annually with 'Houdt het voor bekeken' (#HHVB), a comedy special about the past year in television and film in Flanders. Previous editions of HHVB focused on the future of Flemish media. Where are we headed? How far ahead are we compared to the rest, and where do we stand head and shoulders above the rest? HHVB 2018·2019 takes a different direction. Increasingly, film and television are treating us to that 'remember when?' feeling. Franchises are being rebooted, old celebrities are being brought back, and we also have to keep an eye on VTM's 30th anniversary. Was everything better in the past? Is there still room for originality? Or do Flemish people prefer to be wrapped in a blanket of nostalgia? We will discover this together and, above all, have a lot of fun in the fourth season of 'Xander De Rycke houdt het voor bekeken' (Xander De Rycke calls it quits)..

Hergé, widely recognized as the founder of the clear line style, reflects on his own work. What is a creator? What is an imagined world? What is a line? An ink stroke, a panel border... But what is the clear line style?

The terrible revenge of a woman who sees the man she desires with another woman...

Take5* is a filmed series of encounters between 5 artists and 2 guests who meet for the first time in a specific city to speak about Europe, festivals, the arts and their role in society.

Shot with direct sound, Villofolie presents six people giving a monologue in a destroyed and dehumanized city: Brussels. The film dissects itself to reflect on mental illness and the inability to communicate. The group of people portrayed share feelings of abnormality, anxiety and loneliness.

Told by its characters from a black void. After a terrorist bombing, intelligence officer Helena Brennan is tasked with gathering information about the radical Muslim cleric - al Sharif. On travelling to Pakistan, she becomes involved in a botched mission to capture one of al Sharif’s key lieutenants. One of her colleagues is murdered and another is kidnapped and executed as Helena’s world disintegrates around her. She must hunt down the perpetrators to find redemption. Asks spectators to confront the brutal, misogynist and white-supremacist ideologies of the stories we consume as entertainment. It reveals the role that so many contemporary thrillers force audiences to play and invites them to regret learning their lines.

Moral harassment damages in silence. The fear and shame the victims feel may not be visible but their voices testify for their suffering in Belgian theatre schools.

Winner of the Sakharov Prize 2014, Doctor Mukwege is internationally known as the man who mends thousands of women who have been raped during the 20 years of conflicts in the East of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the poorest countries on the planet, despite its extremely rich sub-soil. His endless struggle to put an end to these atrocities and denounce the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators is not welcome. At the end of 2012, the Doctor was the target of another attempt on his life, which he miraculously survived. Threatened with death, this doctor with an exceptional destiny now lives cloistered in his hospital in Bukavu under the protection of the United Nation peacekeepers. But he is no longer alone in his struggle. The women to whom he has restored physical integrity and dignity, stand beside him, true activists for peace, hungry for justice.

A TV documentary about the singing career of Jacques Brel, beginning with his childhood in Belgium.

Two Palestinian lovers, parted during the 60s when he is imprisoned for resisting the Israeli occupation and she sorrowfully emigrates to the US, come together again in Jerusalem some 18 years later. He works for an agricultural aid organization, she is a scholar researching the meaning of sacrifice in Palestinian society. Around them rages the turmoil of the first Intifada.

After the murder of her fiance, Usagi Tanase wants revenge. In order to do so, she contacts Ryo Saeba, aka City Hunter, the most respected and feared hitman in the city. However, she doesn't know he's also an incorrigible womanizer who accepts contracts on two conditions only ... but what are they?

Benjamin seems stressed: he's about to go through his very first audition. Between awkwardness and absurdity, this audition turns out to be quite unusual.

Teenagers who live in same-sex families talk about their experiences. Together, they question the parental model, their own sexual identity and the consequences of the absence of a father. This is the first French-language documentary to give voice to children raised by gay couples.

Walter, the son of a shipowner, tries to seduce Rika, engaged to the rough fisherman Wan. When Wan sees Walter kiss her, he leaves in anger, only to be caught in a storm at sea. Believed dead, Rika refuses Walter’s proposal. Wan is rescued by Icelandic fishermen and returns months later to marry Rika. Later, the shipowner schemes to commit insurance fraud, but Wan is killed trying to stop a fire. Grief drives Rika mad, until a new storm strands Walter on the shore. Rika revives him with a kiss, healing herself, and a new romance begins between them.

A young and massive metal pole becomes an unusual vehicle for desire. Through the fantasy of being loved – and fucked – the film playfully blurs the boundaries between object and subject, intimacy and projection. In a short, provocative form, it queers the understanding of the body, eroticism and desire, revealing their absurd and yet surprisingly human dimensions.

Filmmaker Sarah Vanagt shoots with a small camera as she wanders through Brussels, where she encounters Polish, Iranian, Brazilian, Belgian, and Moroccan construction laborers, busy at work. At her request, they write notes addressed to future generations, and then hide them—beneath paving stones, inside pipes, or behind walls. Sometimes it’s a wish or reflection; sometimes simply a greeting from the present. One reads: “When you find this, I hope the world is a better place.”

This film is not just an adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. Rather, it addresses the larger cultural myth that has grown from the premise of the book: a white man ‘civilising’ indigenous inhabitants of an island, and claiming the territory as his own property. In a time today when the call to decolonise the artworld and its associated institutions has never been more urgent, Deboosere's cinematic intervention resonates with a large body of work seeking to destabilise and replace the ideology of imperialism. The result is a singular, subversive film, satirical and surprisingly charming at the same time, which makes sure to pay just as much attention to animals and the natural world as to the follies of human-constructed ‘anthropocene’ history.

Manon de Boer films the dancer Cynthia Loemij, who improvises to Eugène Ysaÿe’s 3 Sonates for Violin Solo.

Rodica is a Romanian expat living in Belgium who works hard to support her family. Her love for her children is at once powerful and suffocating. Shot in stark black and white, and with the camera staying within close proximity to its protagonists, the film’s minimalist approach offers a glimpse into the complex intimacies of this family. This is a film about love, fear, anxiety and the complicated emotions that emerge at their intersection.

From the music of UK composer Anne Dudley, Belgian filmmaker Stijn Coninx crafts a story of a hearing-impaired woman on various runs, determinedly straight ahead of herself, crossing deserted forests, meadows and swamps, in different get-ups. This short film is part of the 2x25 Project of Film Fest Gent and the World Soundtrack Awards. The project commissioned 25 composers to compose a short piece of music, after which 25 filmmakers made short films that are the ultimate symbioses of music and cinematography, fitting completely within the DNA of the festival. The result: 25 exceptional films where the music inspired the form, narrative and texture.