Discoveries from Belgium World Cinema

Talking about war could also mean turning off the sound of machine guns, and try to listen to those who remain. I filmed Damascenes exhausted by a never-ending war, in their day to day lives. This film is their story.

Poetic video musical.

This film tells with verve and a touch of self-irony the history of research on the Dogon since the famous 1931 expedition of Marcel Griaule. The film establishes the original expedition in the context of French anthropology at the time. Jean Rouch, celebrated filmmaker and less known as an anthropologist on the Dogon, narrates part of the story, and interviews Dogon elders and veteran expedition-member, Germaine Dieterlen.

This short film highlights the difficulties of communication between two people from to different cultures and with different memories. The love between a Syrian girl and a European guy isn’t strong enough to transcend the differences between them.

A love letter of the director to his children in Iraq, while preparing their favorite meal.

A journey that makes us question what is happening to our planet and what we can still do for it.

Let's give back to the plastic sandal the place it deserves in the humanity shoes Pantheon. If nobody has forgotten the nightmare it was wearing it every summer, who knows its true story? Who did wonder about the extraordinary destiny of this plastic bead invented by accident? Who remembers that after being created in Auvergne, it went through exile, privations and wars? Who knows that it embodied a society ideal and the promises of a better world? Who could imagine that it would be involved in one of the greatest pages of the 20th century History, until becoming the icon of an entire population? It is time to look back on the dark and glory times of the plastic sandal.

In the south of Italy, Rosa and Peppe witness the passing of time as they grow old together and raise a pig.

On the day of the summer solstice, before the harvest, villagers gather to throw away their debris. At midnight, the pile is burned. Three women talk about what they would have liked to have disappeared in the fire.

As she struggles to communicate with her girlfriend during sex, a young woman dives back into a childhood memory that troubles her.

“When I was a child, as soon as night fell, we had to guide my mother on the paths…” Here is a fragment of a personal investigation, an attempt to go back through the generations in order to touch a moment of change.

Lou and Julie became friends in a summer camp. Together, they decided to go hunting the legendary Dahu. But the two friends eventually split. Julie gives up the hunt in the grip of teenage daydreams, while Lou immerses herself body and soul in this quest.

In 1910, an English couple goes to their vacation mansion on the Normandy coast. The wife tries to maintain a love story, out of sight, with one of the maids. Their love transports them to a bucolic world far from the prejudices of society.

A samurai rests in an inn, his katana swinging by his side. The beautiful object will attract some envious people. But everything will not go as planned...

Sonata is the story of a young pianist who performs a passionate sonata on a black grand piano. The spectator is transported into his imaginary world.

Soð is an Icelandic cooking show but this episode is different: It started when artist Christopher Tym asked Kristinn Guðmundsson (the show’s creator) if he could guest direct an episode of the show, but after the first draft went very wrong, the final result ended up becoming a bizarre self-reflexive film about friendship, cooking and film-making. It was funded by an Icelandic television channel but was eventually cut from the programming due to it’s ‘unconventional’ form.

Three men are working on a construction site.The work has been interrupted by five months of imprisonment.The rain suddenly falls like the silence that precedes an eviction.

Thom’s best friend is Stoffel, a 25-year-old Shetland pony. Their friendship is special, because Thom is a boy on the autism spectrum and he doesn’t make friends easily. But the inevitable happens. Thom is getting bigger and won’t fit much longer on Stoffel’s back.

"Flames that Drift" (Laai ende Drift) is an experimental poetry film on super 8mm film that enters into direct intertextual dialogue with Antwerp poet Paul van Ostaijen's 1921 collection "Occupied City," and more specifically his "Music Hall" poems, and set during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in New York. Like van Ostaijen, looking at Antwerp from his voluntary exile in Berlin, Antwerp writer-director Vito A. Rowlands turns the camera on the city that is home to his own voluntary exile, New York City. The film ascertains how his new city, much like his own, has been occupied, if not infected, with viruses that have debilitated Western society for centuries; viruses that we propagate ourselves; that we use to enslave others, in the name of progress; by authorities as much as by aesthetics; by art that towers above us on a daily basis, looking down at us.

With light and shadow as dancing partners, Michèle Noiret enters and explores worlds that she evokes and challenges with her dance. She immerses herself and loses herself in them. The intoxication of dance and the enjoyment of pure cinema surrender to each other in a film in one fluid motion. As in certain dreams.

In Spilliaert, filmmaker Lisa Spilliaert inquires into her blood relationship with the renowned Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert (1881-1946). Is she predestined to an artist’s life by this – whether or not – fictitious kinship? Is artistry passed on genetically? She reveals herself as a rapping, fanatical genealogist who probes into the origins of her artistic identity. Visiting all kinds of archives, she first chalks out the historical figure of Léon Spilliaert and his work. At Ostend’s Centre for Genealogy she attempts to substantiate her claim of kinship with certificates and registers. Spilliaert’s narrative structure is strung together by a number of rap poems, performed by Lisa Spilliaert herself. By choosing this form, she uncovers parallels and contrasts between rap music’s free identity construction and the strictly regulated structure of genealogy.

A travel experience, an encounter with other codes and other gods in a contemporary Lithuania. In the country where legends and pagan practices have survived the influence of the Catholic religion and later the Soviet bloc to feed a folklore still tenacious, weighs the strange sensation of presences belonging to another world. If one takes the time to listen and look, the forest seems inhabited, filled with stories and life. This narrative is part of a search of the other and of different spiritualities. Where some indulge in rituals borrowed from Mongolian traditions while others perpetuate a cultural heritage. If Laima, the mother, the one of destiny, of good and bad fortune, still exists in the Lithuanian culture, the ideology of the Soviet bloc is only a painful page of history.

A Hungarian oral storyteller, and a Lebanese filmmaker—arriving in Budapest from a different era. Each bringing their own stories and entrusting their words to one another rather rhythmically, they weave a layered visual story.

Short animation film.

A race towards the other, with its misunderstandings, for the time a record is playing...

Agulana, February 29th, 3 P.M... That day, a concert took place at the Opera, broadcasted on radio and speakers set up in the streets. The entire population was captivated. So they didn't notice when strange incidents started to happen... (kg)

At 24 glasses per second, Jules the wine goblet and Pierre the beer mug face each other in a duel to conquer Laurence, the pretty champagne flute. It's an action film complete with breathless combats and amazing stunts where there is only one rule: Don't get broken! But sometimes the heart is more fragile than glass.

Short animation film

In DR Congo, one of the most violent regions in the world, «La Lucha», a handful of young people are peacefully fighting for democracy. They have organized a struggle for the departure of President Kabila - now that they have succeed, they realize that the fight has a heavy price. Following for two years their confrontation with repression, the film witnesses a current citizen movement embracing the African continent. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a group of Congolese youths has stood up without arms against their President who was determined to cling to power. As they fought, they have learned that success comes with a price. They are called La Lucha.

An endless void stretches out behind the windows of a large room. Only windows, no doors. It’s empty except for five people sitting at a table that seats six. Their withered bodies adorned with lush fabrics and jewelry, they spend eternity playing with their food. A charged silence fills the air. Any violation of the strict social rules is immediately suppressed by the others. When the fragile equilibrium in the group is finally broken by the boy’s constant pestering, things start spiraling out of control. His mother tries her best to protect both him and herself from the consequences but playing this double role comes at a high price.

We all have a different rhythm. Heen en Weer is a dance about individual rhythms that mingle now, and then seem to clash or just stay separate.

A poetic journey through the history of desire and sexuality, where long-ignored and repressed female pleasure occupies a prominent place.

A semi erotic film about a man in a bar getting served flaming, red, drinks which make him confuse his own fantasy from reality.

One night, Galia, a young 22-year-old woman is woken up by her older brother Alex who's schizophrenic and who recently escaped from a psychiatric facility. Convinced that the end of the world is in two hours, he wants to live with her. Galia will go against her reluctance to support this oppressive brother.

“Carefully positioned, the camera begins on a single frame, the shutter held open, and then is imperceptibly increased in speed, quickening the frame rate and thus changing the exposure time for each successive frame, which slowly produces a visible moving image whose speed eventually falls into step with real time. For a film whose title describes the relatively simple mechanism used to create it, Gradual Speed ushers a series of startling transfigurations which brilliantly engage with the extended time spent with people, animals, events and objects in whose company the filmmaker sketches larger concerns of love, fixity, representation and loss.” — Julie Murray

The incorrigible Stalinist Bolshevik Igor Yaboutich is determined to destroy the Christian West with the ultimate weapon of mass destruction: the atomic bomb! Charleroi, renamed Karminsky Grad for the occasion, is where this diabolical plan will be carried out. In the nuclear weapons factory, the sinister Vladimir Karminsky and Reinhard Heydrich rule with an iron fist. They mercilessly oppress the working class, who revolt and murder their bosses. Chaos breaks out. The situation seems uncontrollable for the Chinese, Arab, Russian, and German leaders, who are all united here against the Americans. Only Igor Yaboutich remains standing in this city of madness. Will he unleash a new world war?

The director recounts his disastrous expedition to Antarctica.

During a zombie breakout, a gambler runs after his money.