Discoveries from Belgium World Cinema

When young adults leave home, daily conversations shift to fleeting phone calls. Amidst the blurring parent-child hierarchies, a new way of connecting with home emerges.

A letter to my grandfather, my great-grandfather's diary, my childhood home, and the recovered images from that time. A search for the beginning of a memory I've inherited.

A seemingly idyllic house undergoes disturbing transformations, reflecting a person's psychological dislocation. The transformation reveals how inner struggles are turned outward, distorting perceptions of the environment.

Alix, 24, cannot have biological children. When her roommate and friend Suzie becomes pregnant, Alix begins experiencing hallucinations related to the world of pregnancy.

In a dark, comic, and oppressive play of power and discomfort, the absurdity of job interviews becomes painfully clear when several applicants try their luck at a floor manager position.

During a family celebration, thirteen-year-old Maya overhears a dark secret about her parents – her father is suffering from a serious illness. Yet everyone acts as if nothing is wrong. Her father and the guests keep celebrating, and Maya is left to face her shock alone. While music plays and a festive atmosphere fills the room, an innocent childhood quietly comes to an end and premature adulthood begins. But how can any of them find comfort when they do not dare to speak about what truly matters? The film Family Celebration was made by Raphaël Venayre at the Belgian film school INSAS.

The film is exploring the problematic relationship of our societies with animals. The anthropomorphization of animals in films contributes to 'human exceptionalism' provoking further issues in the coexistence of animals with humans. The film explores the story of a moon bear that is trying to find its way in a human dominated world out of its natural habitat.

Plunged into the warm darkness of a summer night, the streetlights of Ottignies illuminate cars floating in the air. The next morning, an hourglass-shaped crop circle appears on the Place du Centre, now a parking lot. Two teams of pelota, a local sport displaced by cars more than 30 years ago, are playing there, bringing traffic to a complete standstill.

To become a good dog requires some training – it doesn’t matter what age you are.

On an intimate journey, Lara meets up with her sister Marie, a young woman with Down’s syndrome who is slowly regaining her ability to speak after 3 years of silence. As she revisits her memories, Lara transforms their journey into a quest to redefine their bond and come to terms with the past.

At Recypark Buda, the workers receive the waste... and also the customers' moods.

A poetic documentary in the form of a letter from a son to his mother. What begins as an attempt to tell her story, slowly transforms into something else.

A loving and humorous observation of an extreme doubter in an increasingly complex society.

A young woman suffers from violent visions while she is waiting for the subway...

One Halloween night, Jeanne discovers a package on her doorstep. When she unwraps it, she wasn't expecting to have to play a game of fang-fang with a ghost.

In a weathered corner of Ostende's industrial zone, migrant workers gather for their daily cigarette break, where shared smoke and quiet conversations reveal the poetry in their hard-worn lives.

Arthur and Romain, two brothers, are trying to part with the inheritance left to them by their father, who died seven years earlier. He left them a huge factory measuring over 2,000 square metres in the heart of Brussels. Countless memories are buried in the depths of this factory that stands before them. Their father's spirit hovers over this very special place.

Paula’s House is an animated short that stands as an act of activism, focusing on the experiences of the queer Kenyan community in their struggle for societal acceptance and safety.

Two homeless men become friends at a train station in Brussels.

An essay about love, death and death of love.

Following in the footsteps of pioneers like Émile Cohl, the brilliant inventor and self-taught artist Louis Van Maelder created a body of work of unparalleled richness and inventiveness by drawing directly onto the film strip.

At the end of the 1980s, my father joined the Yugoslav army as a deep-sea diver. I still hear all kinds of stories about that period in his life. My father is very good at telling stories, but in reality our relationship has always been difficult. In the form of a mosaic film, I am looking for connections that do link me to him. Paravan is a poetic documentary about our memories of a shared space, underwater.

A woman. A wife. A mother, my mother. Unstable health and 15 years of battling illness. This film unfolds primarily through a body, her body, her skin, her flesh, and her cells. I explore the organic relationship between illness and my mother's broken and rebuilt body.

Ana travels down memory lane to piece together the story of her daughter’s abduction. The landscapes of the small Romanian town where she lives become the canvases of her thoughts, constantly oscillating between past and present.

SELF-LOVING JEW is a short, intimate documentary following three members of the Anti-Zionist Jewish Alliance in Belgium as they confront what it means to be Jewish in a time of genocide. Often labeled as self-hating, they reflect on intergenerational trauma, faith, family rupture, and political awakening. Their message is clear: to oppose injustice in our name is not self-hatred — it’s self-love.

After the Apocalypse, Theresa takes refuge in an abandoned farm house on the edge of the Nomala desert. One sunny day, she discovers the lifeless body of a young soldier carried in by the river. Theresa takes him to her room that she has arranged in a barn. After resuscitating the young man, she tells him the tale of the Apocalypse and the chaos that followed. She also imparts her vision and the story of how she lost her ring's stone. Two unexpected visitors, Alice (the magic of desire) and a small cosmonaut contribute their own points of view. During conversation they find the trail to the lost stone. The gem turns into an intense light that never leaves them.

A single father of two daughters sees his oldest daughter suffer from cancer. She wants euthanasia but he doesn't want to lose his daughter too like the mother of the daughters.

Maria and her brother have different opinions on what happiness or philosophy are – but they are united when it comes to daydreaming. The film takes us to the intersection of a magical place between past and future, imagination and reality, memory and fiction, opening infinite possibilities for the two young characters.

A video made to accompany the compostion "Five more string quartets" by Phill Niblock, invited by Marie-Hélène Elleboudt to take part in her concert series' Abstract Adventures' in Les bains Connective Brussels 2001. Brussels based composer Stefaan Quix saw the perfomance, adopted the video and connected his composition "The Bazaar and the Cathedral 1.5" to it. With this title the work has been travelling to various places.

Three activist friends return from their first eco-sabotage mission. After blowing up a polluting cement factory, it's time to celebrate and plan their next move. However, Max, the instigator of the project, doesn't seem to be in the mood to celebrate. Her mind is elsewhere.

David Shongo’s 'Café Kuba - Who Dared to Awaken the Dead Memory' is a cinematic and sonic experience that captures the voices of Kinshasa’s café ambulants—mobile coffee vendors who serve as both observers and participants in the city’s everyday conversations. Filmed in the tense weeks following the M23 rebels’ capture of Goma, 'Café Kuba' immerses viewers in the shifting narratives of a city where memory is not static but constantly reshaped by present realities. Through ambient recordings and an evolving musical score, Shongo transforms these anonymous voices into a portrait of Kinshasa’s active memory, mirroring how personal and collective histories are continuously retrieved, reinterpreted, and lived.

The Ballottés, a group of children and young people who are experiencing academic difficulties for various reasons, collected the testimony of Simon Gronowski, one of the last second war survivors. They transmit this story and their thoughts through this documentary that they created with passion.

Authors of the film make the journey both real and mystical through the Buryatia. They are following their character lama Danzan — the spiritual leader and member of parliament of his mysterious country called Little Tibet. Lama Danzan is modern incarnation of the Agvan Dorzhiev, who was the teacher of Dalai-lama XIII and played an important role in the struggle between Britain, China and Russia for the dominance in Tibet at the beginning of XX century. Today lama Danzan is doing everything possible overcoming natural and mystic obstacles to build magic spokes, suburgans, which are believed by him and his followers to change the life of the country for the better .

'Blauw, zo hemelsblauw' is an attempt to slow down. As I spend time with my grandmother, I try to come to terms with the consequences of aging and allow myself to disappear into her fading stories.

ELLIPTIC is a filmwork that considers an image as reflecting light. It looks at how brightly a beam of light is deflected as it hits an edge and transforms the image as it enters a lens. A delicately slow focus shift carries this movement along the cone of the visual field into a certain depth, and back again.

Kevin is being pressured by Thomas. If he doesn't do what's expected of him, things could go very wrong. Kevin eventually finds a solution to complete his task, but it's not easy, especially if Thomas finds out how it went.

Ten-year-old Boris sees his grandpa Jan forgetting more each day: how to set the table, how to tie his shoes, and maybe even who Boris is. Despite this, music keeps them connected. Boris brings Jan to his DJ lessons, where they decide to create a song together as a lasting memory. But as Jan’s world grows foggy, Boris worries if their dream of getting their song on the radio is still possible.

An astronaut is unlucky in space.

Amid the buildings and streets of Ramallah, men take up positions. In a continuous, unedited shot, the camera witnesses a confrontation between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers illegally stationed in the city. With a single gesture, the viewer experiences the occupation of Palestinian territory in real time.

Pieter Verelst’s signature humor is on full display in his show “Amai,” interspersed with musical touches. The show explores his generation, materialism, love, relationships, and anxiety.

The 'waters' refuse to take Arnaki with them. Desperate for a better high, he turns towards his friend Fidi who has something big in mind.

23 dollars buget...

The viewer is lured deep into a dilapidated glasshouse, a place where nature is traditionally tamed and studied, by a ghostly figure, dancing to a variation on the popular song from Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967). As the music fades out, he makes way for the vocal group Black Harmony, offering a reinterpretation of the song in their own language - Lugbara. I Wan’na Be Like You deconstructs and reconstructs the novel, film, that song and their legacies.

Jasper quit his job as a permanent civil servant to pursue his dream of becoming a comedian. Permanent is a comedy show about hard-working civil servants, Japanese toilets, and embarrassing words in Scrabble. The show features well-thought-out humor about working in the civil service, relationships, and the sometimes unconventional thought processes of a comedian.