Discoveries from Belgium World Cinema

But where have the women architects gone? It’s been a few centuries since women have been creating architectural works with passion and talent in a profession dominated by men. History seems to have forgotten them… or have they been consciously erased? Out of the Picture will go in search of these women and their story. Why and how have they been sidelined from the stakes of architecture and what means, what solidarity, will they implement to regain this visibility? Out of the Picture also questions the framework of the image, who has the right to the field? But where have the women architects gone? For several centuries, women have been creating architectural works with passion and talent in a profession dominated by men. History seems to have forgotten them… or have they been consciously erased?

Mario, better known as cartoonist AAaRGh..., has autism. But he doesn't know that. Nobody knows that. Until he's 31. Then he gets the diagnosis, a year after his life changed forever. A show with answers. And humor.

Hairy loves to toast, but making toast isn't without danger.

Biological programming, still existent in today’s living beings, prompts a reflex to stay away from fire if it cannot be contained, such as in the case of a wildfire. A ‘meditation on fire’ may therefore sound like a contradiction. Inspired by the inquiry in the amount of power needed to produce a digital “still life” of fire, a task likely to set the computer system on fire, Wildfire confronts the biological and the digital. Prolonged shots of silenced fire comply with the notion of biological breathing time, while the abstract nature of the burning fire serves as a metaphor for the technological abstraction linked to its making, hinting at the increasingly abstract world we live in. In Wildfire (meditation of fire) the camera has been removed and disintegrated into a numerical system of binary codes. We are confronted with an illusion of an image, a hallucination, a visual construct of computing. These images offer an immersive experience of the otherwise un-experienceable.

Maëlle comes out of school. Today, Martha, her mother, came to pick her up. They leave together to the sea by car. Their long separation does not make things easier and the little girl discovers the truth behind this mother.

In the summer of 2012, Kyutae’s only friend, Young, disappeared, leaving behind a message: "Gliders can fly without engines. Isn't it cooool?" After that day, Kyutae began to see flying gliders in the sky all the time during morning assembly, in the classroom, even when he went to sleep. Then one day, a real glider fell from the sky and landed right next to him.

How does one ‘scrub’ a moving image? For Belgian video artist Antonin De Bemels, this means taking hold of the footage and winding it (both sound and image) back and forth in a stuttering, constantly interrupted, but expressive manner. The internationally renowned dancer Bud Blumenthal rests his head on the frame of a reflective window and turns his body this way and that; the film highlights and abstracts the strangeness of both movement and setting.

Fantasmagoria explores how political architecture takes shape and evokes meaning in the public realm, featuring footage from Skopje and Brussels. Starting from a personal journey to Skopje, Fantasmagoria sheds light on the tensions surrounding the controversial Skopje 2014 project, which reshaped the cityscape with neoclassical façades and monumental statues. How do such interventions function as propaganda? And how are they experienced by residents, artists, and architects?

A narrated poem, a love letter from the machine to the human, a story about distances.

The demise of the dinosaurs fuels our imagination. Dinosaurs are as mythical as dragons, but they were also real. After a meteor strike, dust prevented any sunlight from reaching the Earth. A team of scientists examines a single fine line in the rock bed that contains minute-by-minute knowledge of that disastrous day 66 million years ago.

Bazart live at Ancienne Belgique on May 13, 2016.

Oscar and the Wolf live at Tomorrowland July 20, 2025.

The voice-over leaves little to the imagination: the aim of the film is to expose the wretched living conditions in the Marolles. In this run-down working-class area in the shadow of the Law Courts, children and adults live on different planets. For the children the street, a courtyard or wasteland are a playground. A site where social housing is to be built is an ideal spot on which to build a camp. While the women do the housework and the men go to work or linger in a bar, the children meet up at their secret location. The accompanying voice-over points out the typical character of the working-class area. Many of the images from this film are also to be found in the full-length film Jean Harlez made about this city neighbourhood (Le chantier des gosses, The kids' building site 1956).

John Nada discovers the existence of an alien invasion and goes to war against them, aided by a Russian Sarah Connor who puts him in touch with the resistance.

Lifelong Syrian friends Qusay and Nabil spend a day in their Berlin apartment, drifting through dreams, archival footage and present-day events to confront the shifting faces of political violence. Together, they hold on to love and care as the most radical acts of resistance.

Portraying a place, a workshop, and projecting our imaginations onto it. Taking this commonplace setting as a backdrop for an animated film. A film where dreams are shared experiences. Dreams are reality.

A brilliant and highly poetic collection of tiny moving image moments which offers aesthetic delights through cleverly chosen camera angles, framing, lighting, montage and the materials used. This archive of trifles remains silent. The eyes begin to hear, the sound is generated in the mind. Simply enchanting.

Six Brussels children between ten to twelve years old make an animated film together in which they let their imaginations run wild. With great care, they sculpt characters, build sets, and bring everything to life with stop-motion. The end result is a universe full of angels and monsters, a creative translation of the way they experience the world around them. Filmmaker Patrick Van Antwerp gives a fascinating insight into the children’s creative process and the workings of the studio.

A group of children from a working-class neighborhood in Brussels made an animated film about street football. Using simple materials, they built a model of their street and used plasticine to create colorful figures of themselves. Picture by picture, they brought their neighborhood and game to life. The short film is a creative and playful ode to street football and the importance of playing space in the city.

Short film by Evita & Emanuel.

The Round Belly Wolf lived with a round belly, but all empty. One day, by chance he found out a hidden talent to finally fill his tummy.

A supermodel, fresh from walking the red carpet at the world-famous Venice Film Festival, finds herself taking a mysterious coffee break with a golden spoon in St. Mark's Square. The empty city wants to tell her something of vital importance; it's as if an unknown force has taken control.

Winter, 2025. Belgium—unknown. Video-notes from a seven-day bicycle tour. Only wind, rain, pedaling, and abandoned places, where the filmmaker spends his time or sleeps.

Serenity in the Heights is a short film created by students of LUCA School of Arts in Ghent, Belgium. In 2024, it won the Student Award at the fourth edition of the Venice Architecture Film Festival, where it was screened under the theme “Adaptations".

By popular demand, here at last is the 4th volume of the Festival SPASM horror DVDs. It is by far the most BLOODY, the funniest, and above all the most TERRIFYING of the series. This time, alongside Quebec horror films, you’ll also find French and Belgian films. Among the 12 horror short films included on the DVD, you’ll see a guy trapped in Cabine of the Dead, die-hard hunters in Quebecers vs Zombies 2, a terrified babysitter in Red Balloon, a haunted movie theater in Saturation, and the return of your favorite killer — the BAGMAN!

In a dystopian future, where society has become completely alienated from each other and physical contact has been forbidden, a young man, Noah, struggles with his growing desire for intimacy. Isolated in a world where people no longer touch each other, Noah discovers the existence of a secret “touch therapy,” which quietly helps people overcome their fear of physical contact. This scene not only explores the ever-increasing isolation of humans in an increasingly polarized society but also touches on the taboo surrounding sex work. The film emphasizes the essential human need for touch and physical contact in a time of growing individualism.

It's possible to work without bosses, and workers have proven it in Belgium, notably at Balai Libéré, a cleaning company at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, at Sablières de Wauthier-Braine, and at the Textiles d'Ere cooperative, a spinning mill that operated as a cooperative for nearly 30 years. The film focuses mainly on this third experience. The workers (90% of the staff are women), whose memories have been rekindled by a video shot at the time, recount the occupation of their factory. We then see them at work. Everyday scenes and interviews follow one another, revealing the changes that have taken place. Or that sometimes have not taken place.

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.

Bernières-sur-Mer is a small French commune in Calvados, Normandy. Located on the beaches where the Allied forces landed during World War II, it is one of the towns in the region closest to sea level. It is one of the French communes listed in the latest IPCC report as being subject to radical changes in the coming years.

A 24-year-old woman tells the story of her relationship with her body and how pole dancing changed her.

Mimmo and his friends explore their hometown again during a period of changements in the area. They see Maasmechelen revive next to them and experience it as progressively abandoned. The documentary shows how they creatively spend their summer and how they deal with boredom. They do this between the streets and former remains of the mining industry. They're in search of what still connects them towards each other and their relationship to what they, all for themselves, call home.

In 1956, Louis Carré bought, on the advice of his friend Jean Monnet, a piece of land near Paris in order to build a new house. Wil Grohmann, a Berlin art critic, put him in touch with the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, who would complete the construction of this house three years later. This historical anecdote is the origin of a trip through Europe that links the Carré house and the experimental house, built in Finland by Aalto, with buildings located in Brussels, Venice and Porto. These places, whose history resonates with European history, question, thanks to knowledge from the sciences, the existence of the membranes (whatever it is : a micro-organism, a house, a state, …) that allow a place to develop, to interact with the outside world. In the end, this film favors the notion of exchange over that of borders and evokes the possibility of tracing other paths within the European space.

In an ever-growing chinese capital, everyone dreams of a better life. What will happen when the dream of the city will overcome the dream of its citizens ?

Mariechen, Ana and Juliette are three friends in an online world. They are all from the same place but have not met in real life. They have a friendship online and talk almost every day about their life.

Neris and Nicole are two women who have left their native country, in the hope of a better life. They are cleaning up places in private households. They don’t know each other but something links them together. The source of their strength.

In Inuit land, away from the world, Iqaluit is nevertheless a cosmopolitan city, because many people come from the four corners of the world to work in this capital of the Canadian territory of Nunavut. A city where some 8,000 inhabitants live, a diverse microcosm in Arctic soil.

Victor Van Rossem travels from Belgium to Austin, Texas to search for a man named Neal D Retke, only because Facebook said that they could be friends. A documentary about Facebook, friendship and fortune fish.

To prove that he's still fit to live at home, an old man suffering from Alzheimer's disease must search the depths of his mind, where memories pile up like jigsaw puzzles, in search of a forgotten past.

Collected sketches by the Flemish comedy duo Gaston & Leo.