Discoveries from Belgium World Cinema

A body is floating in the water. A strange bird is calling and memories come alive again. “Where were you when I was in despair?”, asks the friend.

On January 31, 1980, in Guatemala, while the civil war between the military dictatorship and the Marxist guerrillas dragged on, 32 representatives of Indian peasant associations came from the four corners of the country and peacefully occupied the Spanish embassy, to claim their rights. None come out alive. All are burned alive by the ruling military junta. Only the ambassador survives.

Elias Van Dingenen is a Belgian comedian

Emzo is a queer activist from Georgia who had to flee his country 5 years ago. In Belgium he continues his struggle.

Chelsea was placed in a youth institution not long after she was born. In "Chelsea's Blues" she visits key figures in her life, trying to gather more information about her upbringing and to talk about who she is and who she wants to be.

Presents the work of the provincial insitution for the blind and the deaf- mutes at Berchem - Ste Agathe.

Seeking to unite magic with science, Theodore soon realizes that not all science is without its sacrifices.

Naima Joris and Vitja Pauwels symbiotically merge their sound with Jan van IJken's live edited microscopic images of plankton, to offer a glimpse into the underwater world as you've never seen it before. The title O is a reference to the circle of life of which plankton is an integral part, and a play on 'eau', the French word for water.

Admitting you're wrong is hard, but what if you're both right and too stubborn to admit it? A film inspired by body language and miscommunication.

Get spooked with Piet Piraat! Piet Piraat docks with his Scheve Schuit in Plopsaland De Panne for a scary adventure! Do you know all the Piet Piraat hits by heart? Sing and dance along to Het Spook, Halloween, Troopsoep and many other songs!

'Alberta's Room' is a journey through the dreams and nightmares of Alberta Gay, the mother of pop icon Marvin Gay. The film takes a different look at his tragic fate and explores the female perspective of a drama that was always portrayed as a male story.

Pippa and Victoria’s favourite pastime is skating. But there are new frustrating “NO SKATING” signs cropping up everywhere in the city. The two refuse to let this get them down and forge a plan to take back the city. They want to organise a street contest to find more allies – and to finally skate again!

In this sharp animation, a mountain man battles an antagonist made of stone amidst a harsh winter landscape. Good thing he’s a skilled skier.

Animated short film about genocide through the eyes of a mindless robot, set in an apocalyptic world.

Marta and her colleagues are migrant workers. They travel from Poland a few months every year and plant the seeds for their (grand)children's future at home.

They come from Germany, France and Italy. They travel dozens of kilometres every night. Have the wolves crossed Belgium’s borders? Is Belgium ready? What would you do if you saw a wolf? Canis Lupus Belgicus is a radio investigation into the tracks of the wolf in Wallonia.

'Meditation On A Landscape' is a video work that reflects on the inherent qualities of a landscape, and how they interact with us in different emotional ways as we move through and past them. Inspired by a personal journey across several borders, along rivers and mountains, in search of a sense of tranquility and a clearer view of self, the work came together as a fluid organism made of sound and image. An organism consisting of short natural impressions, constantly transforming themselves into something new, somewhere between abstraction and figuration. A work about holding on and letting go.

Animated private diary revealing the different imaginary identities the director took on in his childhood.

Recorded live in Brussels, Belgium at the Ancienne Belgique on November 17th 2002.

A young fairy leads a boring life at the fairytale castle. She’d rather be a witch and get really messy. She therefore decides to run off to the witch forest.

Der Kreislauf depicts a unique game that is played on Belgium's beaches in the summer months. When the weather is good, one can find colorful flowers for sale in small, impromptu-build shops. But these flowers hate being watered or rained on, as they are made of paper. Der Kreislauf takes an intimate look at the young players. Flower shops have been open for business on the beaches of Belgium since at least the late 1920s.

The looks of a character of mixed ethnicities are continuously changing: hair and skin colour shift, intersect and alternate each other, creating a choreography of looks and poses based on representations throughout art-history and pop culture.

Agnes Steenssens approaches prisoners in Belgium and the United States, she highlights what is left behind the committed offenses in the context of restorative justice.

The film depicts a local Flemish festival.

From archival images, an improbable story is woven of a boy who couldn't stop crying, creating both floods and paradises.

A duel behind closed doors in the form of verbal jousting that pays tribute to the Film Noir, with a good touch of Belgian-style absurdity.

The Solvay councils were organized to debate current issues in the field of physics, these debates shaped the form of modern quantum physics we know today. But what exactly is quantum physics and why was it such a controversial theory?

In this adaptation of Georg Leß's "Anderkatt (The Haircut)," two women converse through an uncanny amalgam of images and soundscapes. One is on an expedition; the other follows the expedition's progress from afar.

Occupied by Israel in 1967, the Syrian Golan has a military border running through it, which families “cross” by shouting to their loved ones. From his European exile, anxiety-ridden Alhasan Yousef attempts to break free from his inner isolation with this exploration of the power of sound, in an effort to reconnect with his lost country from afar.

“Baba” spent 30 years of his life working in Saudi Arabia while his daughters grew up in Cairo. Much of their relationship was created and preserved through videos exchanged over the years. When they are reunited, none of the family members completely manage to abandon this form of communication, as if trapped in the logic of exile.

Where I lay my head to rest is a summary, a reverie, a confession. A personal account of how it feels to be a woman in this world. An exploration of the interior; psychological as well as material. The little life in the city, with all its obstacles, in all its beauty.

Three avatars embark on a quest through simulated, oil-drenched landscapes in search of a girl whose body is scattered across the glittering surfaces of late capitalism. Different realities bleed into one another, creating a zone where ghostly paparazzi flashes, celebrity saints, magic plants, and subterranean histories of fossil fuels coagulate.

There are around 280 million people in the world with depression - and one depressed teddy bear. Life can be hard to cope with, even for humans. But for Erinbear, ordinary chores seem impossible.

Tired of always being offered the same cliché roles, Tom, a committed Franco-Beninese actor, decides to make his first feature film featuring racialized actors. He calls on a film crew to film the realization process.

At the start of the 20th century, the industrial revolution radically transformed agricultural methods aimed at mass production to eradicate hunger. Today, the food industry produces enough food for 12 billion people. A third of this food is thrown away or burnt while a billion people around the world are still hungry. What is the alternative?

HORAIZON is an experimental film that oscillates between photography, moving image and sound. The title refers to the English phonetic pronunciation of the word "horizon". The film was shot in various locations around the world (Iceland, USA, Japan, Turkey, Belgium).

Orlando journeys around the world in search of his lost mind. As part of his quest, he decides to travel to the moon. There he finds a palace where all the lost memories from earth are hidden. Upon seeing the beauty around him, he decides to stay.

Through old letters, Merle revisits her past as an anti-Apartheid activist, which fractured her relationship with her mother forever. At the same time, she faces her privilege in today's South Africa and her own relationship with her daughter.

Bucharest, Sector 1, North Station. Ilinca, Melinda, Nicoleta and Nella fight every day to survive. A friendship is gradually forged between them and me, despite the incessant presence of money, the brevity of my stays in Romania, despite the language barrier, despite drugs and injuries.

An intriguing mosaic film in which we follow a number of characters on the beach. A woman starts talking to someone who has dialed the wrong number, a son tries to explain to his mother why he has already deposited 2,000 euros to his girlfriend he has never seen and we also see someone walking around with a metal detector.

Amina Abouelghar is followed in a desolate desert where she waters some cacti and when she falls asleep she is transported to somewhere else. She wakes up in a chair and spontaneously starts dancing.

The elderly Isabel Cardoso works in the kitchen of a nursery school. Her hands are worn, her memory sharp and heavy with grief. In moments of stillness she reaches across the divide, communicating with her deceased mother through the stirring winds, the rippling surface of water, the cracked earth. A richly intimate documentary mosaic of the strength, struggle and transcendence of black womanhood.

Three decades after his second burial, Hungarian executed prime minister, Imre Nagy, is out of the grave again. In his wanderings through the streets of Budapest, Imre gets trapped. Hopelessly, he tries to find a way out; to die again. What is dead, will die again. Over and over. A city symphony with horses, pistols and a cowboy; a western film. A duel between "the image" and "the visual", inspired by Friedrich Schiller's "Das Lied von der Glocke".

A Nepali restaurant and its owner are melancholily waiting for customers to show up.

A young woman refuses to accept change in her life, choosing to purposefully look the other way, rather than face the facts. However, the change itself does not allow that.

A woman lives in a quiet flat, constantly occupied with domestic chores that she performs consciously and meticulously. The sound of a leak disrupts the quietness. As the drops fall, unspoken memories emerge.

As Christmas approaches, all the trees are cut down in the forest, all except one: Benjamin the little tree. Sad to be on his own, he decides to look for a family who could adopt him...

The Minuscules accompanies the evolution of a civic struggle in Nicaragua, initiated by the peasants' movement against the construction of the Grand Interoceanic Canal that would cut the country in half at the feet of the volcano, through lakes, forests and farmland. In a reaction against multiple abuses of power, different social movements converge and, in April 2018, the insurrection explodes. This is the struggle of Elba, Doña Chica, Gaby, Elyla and many other "minuscules", from the edge of the trench to exile. What does resistance create?

Some girls prostitute themselves under a highway bridge, a tropical forest on the outskirts of the city, and a strange reunion between a mother and her son, who seems to love his mom a little too much. 'All the love of the world' is like a vivid, brutal and disturbing daydream, immersed in 'Yes sir, I can boogie', the cult song of Baccara.