Discoveries from Belgium World Cinema

A young married woman collects the sweet memories of her romance. On closer inspection, she leaves bits of herself behind.

Close Circuit is an audiovisual essay exploring the affective power of repetition in ‘oddly satisfying’ and ASMR videos. The visual source material we used consisted of online videos connected to the OS genre, while the auditory source material was compiled from ASMR videos. The editing structure reflects the fragmented repetitivity of the source videos that have been looped and manipulated through different compositing, distortion, and AI effects to create a seamless flow of motion that is at once mesmerizing and disorienting. Hereby, we aim to emphasize the affective intensity of OS/ASMR videos as well as their uncanny nature as mechanical animated loops, depicting them as a manifestation of the ‘fraught relation’ between our bodies and our machines.

A film by Roland Lethem

Follow Arama, guided by a mystical pomegranate tree, meeting a mysterious man. Along the way, Arama faces parts of himself, slowly putting together the puzzle of his identity. But before he is able to put everything together, will he manage to keep himself in one piece?

Si-G is a 13 year-old rapper and special needs student, who has never believed she could possibly make it in life . When Brussels based rapper Zwangere Guy decides to make a track with her, her dream unexpectedly comes closer.

Unexpectedly, Marion Guillard captures the perfect shot: A flock of birds pirouette in the evening sky, the camera follows their graceful movements as if hypnotized, symbiotically. The road to this moment was long. Guillard shares her journey to the USA with us, which is not only marked by feelings of alienation from her family – the postcard motifs spread before her eyes also leave her cold. In a voiceover, she talks about her relationship to herself and her body, about an ideal of femininity she does not conform to, and disturbing encounters with men.

Two sisters comb each other's hair to the Blue Danube waltz by Johann Strauss || (1866), circling each other more and more vigorously. Combing, a simple act from our daily routine, here turns into an alienating and almost aggressive choreography.

The voices of Jamal's North African friends, imprisoned in detention centers, come from the mountains around the metropolis of Athens. He, confined to a small room on the eighth floor of a half-abandoned building, searches for the words that would resolve the labyrinth of life and existence.

A contemplative observation of the labour, rhythms, and sounds inside the greenhouse of a flower nursery.

A conference full of tragicomic jokes about the state of the planet, the new generations, and the growing resistance against... well... everything! Against scientists, the elite, crocs, corona, or white men... Everyone is against something, but no one stands for anything anymore. Enough! We must rebel against this urgently.

A bombed city under martial law and powers on the verge of a new war gives home to deceit and uncertainty in 1948 Vienna. The city, divided among the allied powers, is also hosting the filming of The Third Man. Its star, American actor Orson Welles, spends his after-hours in the well-known Hotel Orient, soon to be disturbed by Soviet troops led by a young officer. On his mind is only one mission: how can he use the strengths and weaknesses of the great Orson to change the course of history, while in the U.S. big Hollywood names are targeted in the Red Scare initiating the McCarthy era?

Whilst dreaming, a little boy in the company of Tijl (Uilenspiegel?) travels centuries back to the fairytale world with the help of two balloons.

Jan, 48, neurotic and socially awkward, tries to find some peace of mind during a chaotic train journey. He escapes into a dream about geese.

the jay, the train, the moss, the soil trembling. how to listen to a space considered empty? ‘underneath it flickers’ takes different perspectives on la friche josaphat, a verdant fallow land in brussels threatened by real estate development. by questioning our ways of looking and listening, the film seeks to connect with the land as a single body inhabited by many creatures.

MDCIII play live at the Flanders Arts Institute for Belgian Jazz Meeting 2017.

In apnea, with a fulfilled throat, time twists like the body under tension. Pleasure shared to the point of hallucination.

"Inquiry of Shadows" is a documentary that delves into the hidden depths of the Uyghur genocide in China. Through personal accounts, expert insights, and historical analysis, the film unveils the dark nexus of psychological warfare, cultural obliteration, and the silencing of artistic and intellectual voices.

Astaire Dierickx, a bachelor and bon vivant, goes to a hospital for observation. He has a great time with his roommate Wimke and the young nurses and can't resist teasing Sister Alegonde, the head nurse of the clinic, from time to time. Astaire feels at home there until the doctor comes to tell him the painful news that he has lung cancer and only a few months to live. From the moment his family finds out, they gather around his sickbed to prevent his fortune from slipping through their fingers. However, Astaire has other, much grander plans for his fortune.

In Martinique, centuries of colonisation, slavery and migration have intermingled peoples from the four corners of the earth, making each one the son of all. Starting from a dialogue between the slaves thrown into the Atlantic during the slave trade and the migrants who are dying today in the Mediterranean, this film questions current identity-based divisions and shows us that another world is possible.

Elias Van Dingenen is a Belgian comedian

Our character Hélène travels from one dream to another in her life, her only grip with the present the rehearsal of a play, "Ulcer". Strangely, all the colorful real events respond to her sinister dreams and rantings in black and white. The trivial events of the repetition take on meaning, and then draw the map of a great inner journey.

When Loesje goes to sleep, she dreams about Bumba, Bumbina, and the circus director. Bumbina gives her a ribbon as a gift and teaches Loesje how to dance with it.

Two Filipino women in Germany, their two daughters, the recording of their stories. The document of a word, its collection and circulation between families and languages.

Valérie Haesevoets, a television journalist, visits Anne Karski, an emancipated vampire who fights against prejudice and stereotypes. At what age do vampires die? And why can't the "undead" find true love?

Nina is a young girl who doesn't know how to communicate with other children. One day, she forms a new friendship in the park with Ellie. But when Nina becomes insecure and starts fearing she'll lose her new friend, she lets her emotions take over.

The girls in orange are neighbors and spend time in the backyards. They lead a quiet, joyful and casual life. Until the day when one of them accidentally hangs a young man's sweater with his basket... A poetic, funny and astonishing film, close to the worlds of Jacques Tati and Jacques Demy. "Girls in Orange" is an educational film, which contains: a method for whitening goldfish, a classification of sexes according to color, a formula for making soap bubbles, a way to rewind threads that unwind, a observation from the top of roofs, a theory of up and down, angling maxims, a five-step dance manual, a method of communicating in the palms of the hands, a way of singing out of tune, and, finally , a method for filming clumsily but surely.

An old orchard through the seasons, organ music, a plant classification from the 17th century, porcelain with floral motifs: Arbor, Cremium, Frutex, Herba attempts to convey a landscape heritage by means of various depictions.

A young woman becomes enthusiastic about survival after the end of the world. She rediscovers the joys of skiing and the beauty of nature then visits an empty airport (which is not a bad thing).

Essentieel (1964) is a short experimental film made by Belgian abstract painter Jef Verheyen in collaboration with poet Paul De Vree. A cinematic equivalent of Verheyen’s attempts in representing the warmth and vibrations of light in his monochrome or ‘essentialist’ paintings of the late 1950s and 1960s, the film plays on the tensions between abstract color surfaces and natural elements.

21-year-old Sam Carton, after amputating her leg due to untreatable CRPS, embarks on a journey to surf and pursue her dream of becoming a photographer.

Nevine carries the legacy of a Kurdish mother, an exile and a daily activist for the cause of kurd people. The film tells the story of this mother-daughter confrontation at the heart of the question of transmission; what heritage do we carry? How to free ourselves from it while giving meaning to our roots and helping future generations to build their identity?

Hand-drawn frame by frame from memory, SIE (She) invites the viewer to encounter a person who meets their gaze without seemingly being able to look back at them. In and in-between 70.000 drawings made over the past 20 years, Alexander Schellow reconstructs 105 minutes of the face of his grandmother. Born in 1913 in Königsberg, she died in a home for people with dementia in Berlin at the age of 102. The intertwined streams of remembering and forgetting form a space of immersive sound and image. They unfold an impossible cinematic archive — a place inhabited by disparate temporalities. Yet, together with the perpetually transforming cartography of black spots and acoustic traces questions of response-ability, care, representation and embodied history are set into movement across the projection screen.

A crazy woman has all kinds of visions.

The day of the family Christmas party, 7-year-old Noham is dropped off by his father at a hotel where he is reunited with his mother, whom he hasn’t seen since she moved out of the family home. During this particular afternoon, Noham tries to unravel the mystery that lies behind his mother’s isolation.

Do you know the children’s story The Twelve Months? In Prague, everyone knows it. In the tale, little Maruška is sent on an impossible mission to find strawberries in the middle of winter—and she truly does. As we delve into Maruška’s story, we enter a strange space where the boundary between reality and pure fantasy begins to blur. The filmmakers Juliette Léonard and Mathilde Bédrune apply this idea to contemporary phenomena such as ASMR videos and virtual reality. This short documentary was made at the Belgian film and drama school INSAS in collaboration with Prague’s FAMU.

The British poet John Milton is the inspiration to this film with images of great beauty about the contradictions of the human soul, torn between the Beautiful and the Horrible, Guilt and Innocence, in a journey through Art and the representation of the human body. This is the third short of director Jérémy Adonis, following “Zone 37” (2015) and “Son of Icarus” (2016). With Pierre Anganda.

Dave Gentic, a man with an old camera as a head, and Headgun, are alone in a sleazy old bar, the Strobelodz, talking nonsense, while stories are happening on the television. But Dave doesn't look okay.

A silky roman-photo through forest, winter and warm nymph mysteries.

The first thing you hear is the murmur of the waves. Gradually some children arrive. They frolic on the beach, dig in the sand, get one another wet and have fun together. At some point, Nina finds herself all alone on the shore. She climbs over the cliffs and waves wash away traces in the sand.

Lotta feels different from other children. That's why she spends her days in the Land of Grey and Gloom. She is lonely and bored, until the moment she discovers a very colourful world behind the grey walls, inhabited by children who are all a little different, for their own reasons: the Oddballs Outpost.

To hear the sound of the ocean in the Himalayas... This unlikely wish takes a film director and her three girls to Gyütö, where a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, perched high, echoes day and night the sound of sacred tantric chants of meditation, «which sound like the waves of the ocean». Wandering freely about wherever their curiosity leads them, they discover the daily life of 400 monks living there. Over time, a dialogue develops and a growing complicity emerges. From this intimate immersion, a film takes form, unfolding like a wave both visually and in sound. The reality of Buddhism is revealed in a way that is unprecedented, in the spontaneity of the questions asked, as well as with the sensitive understanding of a child's point of view and with no proselytization at all.

Fred and Nina, a precarious couple, are desperately trying to have a child. After 6 unsuccessful attempts at in vitro fertilization, they learn that the 7th will not be reimbursed by their mutual insurance company. To earn money, Fred decides to become an erotic dancer. Nina conditionally accepts. But when Fred becomes more and more familiar with the world of sex work, discovering a new way of living his masculinity, he no longer respects the conditions imposed by Nina. The couple begins to fall apart. Can they overcome this ordeal?

Jan Jaap van der Wal is a Dutch comedian