Brussels, La Monnaie Opera House. Three people near the end of their lives meet with choreographers, actors and musicians. They take part in a unique experience which involves music, dance and silence. Their journey becomes a tribute to the fragility of the human condition, between reality and representation, tragedy of the body and freedom of the spirit. Together they question their own relationship with death.
Lettre d’un cinéaste à sa fille is a playful, free and personal film in the form of a letter, a film interwoven with a thousand stories knit together with different textures, a book of images where a filmmaker shows the images and the stories he wants to share.
As a letter to her son, the filmmaker testifies her experience as a photographer aboard the Aquarius, a ship that rescued 29,523 people in the Mediterranean between 2016 and 2018.
From Belgium, Jialai Wang maintains contact via smartphone and camera with her mother and grandmother in China. When her grandmother’s health deteriorates, Jialai returns to Shanghai, but when she arrives, her grandmother has already died, and she is left alone with her mother. A devout Buddhist, her mother seems to pay more attention to her daily prayers, Maoist past and dog Dongdong than she does to her daughter. She herself had been abandoned as a child by her own mother, when she divorced Jialai’s grandfather and moved to the city.
A summer day in Italy. The camera follows the deaf-mute Giacomo and a childhood girlfriend Stefi closely – in the woods, by the river – without wanting to disrupt the mystery of their relationship, between restrained sensuality and childhood games.
Everyone calls him Kev, this pale-looking redhead, who a social worker found, as a child, locked in a bedroom where he had only rays of sunshine to play with. Now a teenager, Kevin suffers from a form of autism so severe that the majority of so-called specialised institutions have long refused to take him in. Clémence Hébert followed him with her camera, from one place to another. She, who is gifted with speech and he, who lives without, tamed each other as peers with a lens as the only medium of recognition, which captures what palpitates, appears, withers, and recommences. A discontinued but living link.
The daily work of Fabienne Roelants and Christine Watremez, two Brussels anesthesiologists who are among the most renowned specialists in surgical hypnosis.
A computer screen, images from the four corners of the world. We cross borders in one-click while another trip’s story reach us in bits, through text messages, chats, phone conversations, and an immigration office’s questionnaire. It’s the journey of Shahin, a 20-year-old Iranian boy who, fleeing his country alone, lands in Greece, then winds his way to England where he claims asylum.
This film is the result of more than two years of work tracking down archive material and witnesses close to Mobutu in Africa, Europe and the U.S. More than 950 hours of footage have been seen by the world. Among the 104 hours selected as the basis for this film, are 30 hours of archives recently discovered in Kinshasa and never before released. Completing these exceptional documents, are more than 50 hours of interviews with those close to the former president and the events surrounding his reign, conducted by the director in Kinshasa, Brussels, Paris and Washington. Like a vast historical puzzle, this film pieces together the tragic history of a country, and its self-styled leader - the dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, "King of Zaïre".
Violeta and Vyollca Dukay live in the south of Kosovo, close to the border with Albania. Faced with a very high unemployment in their country since the end of the war, they became deminers. They’ve been going to the minefields every day for six years now. The unique and very strong relationship that exists between the two sisters helps them to overcome their fear and to keep hoping in spite of the precariousness of their situation and the risks they run each day to earn their living.
A first-person documentary about the Canary Islands. Belgian filmmaker Isabelle Dierckx encounters local people and customs while investigating a copy of Luis Buñuel's film L’Âge d’or, which was buried in the volcanic soil by the Surrealists to protect it from destruction by Franco's regime.
A film made of objects, faces and texts; of lost cats, of found pictures, cut-outs, recreations; a poetic subversion in diary form, one that breaks the calendar into a novel, driving relentlessly as a journey to the end of the world.
In Ulan Bator, Mongolia, the cur Baatar is shot by a hunter hired by the authorities to get rid off the dogs in the city...
How do humans and animals see each other? Dominique Loreau captures astonishing exchanges of “views” between people and animals who coexist in the city, in farms, slaughterhouses, zoos, museums, or in a dance rehearsal room. In The Eyes Of A Beast questions the permeable boundary between man and animal.
Belgian filmmaker Eric Pauwels' meditation on dream, travel and film.
A diffraction of the autobiography using family footage filmed between the 1940s and today, this "science fiction documentary" creates multiple "I"s and transcends a story of mourning
Le Cercle des noyés is the name given in Mauritania to black political prisoners imprisoned from 1987 in the old colonial fortress of Oualata. This film touches on the fragile process of unveiling memories by one of these former prisoners who remembers his story and that of his companions. In a visual echo, the places of their confinement come one after another denuded from any traces of that past.
Over many years, the director’s father filmed his family life almost obsessively. His daughter’s birth, his son’s first steps, and always Valérie, the young mother. An impressive fund of material which their now grown-up daughter Faustine appropriates to tell quite a different story: that of a woman who sees her role as a mother and its demands take away her freedom step by step.
Unexpected shelter made of prefabs in the heart of a burning city, the supervised drug consumption facility is open every day of the year. Cause some things know neither relief, nor rest, nor death. A place like no other where to come back, again and again, because here, they would make you feel, at last, you’re someone.
