Dérives

In an abandoned hospital on the outskirts of Brussels, strangers come and go while ghosts linger. Among the shards of glass, a young streamer performs a live sex show for an online subscriber. Under the same dilapidated roof, an old woman lights a fire and drinks her sorrows away in the room where her husband stayed until he died. A chance encounter between these two lonely beings will unleash a flood of memories and virtual data. But real-life connections are scarce, and mutual consolation seems a distant dream. Porcupines are said to gather on cold winter days to share body heat with their fellows, but ultimately injure each other with their quills. How is it that our slightest attempts at intimacy so often see us retreating once more into solitude?

Galician writer Xavier Queipo is getting ready to move back to his homeland after more than 30 years of living in Brussels. He empties his house and puts his memories in boxes the removal company loads onto their truck to take them to Spain. Another Galician man, the filmmaker Hugo Amoedo, who is based in Brussels, too, wonders whether and when he’ll be back in his homeland. In the meantime, he teaches his son to ride a bike, wonders, dreams, struggles to unravel ideas for films, and argues with the clerks of the Brussels post.

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.

One day, the tree is considered mature. In any case, it is exploitable for the industry. So, we mark it and then cut it down. With the chainsaw or the harvester, it depends. And then it becomes biomass, pallets, panels, pellets, crates, paper pulp for printing promotions. But what profit does man get from the pains he takes under the sun?

Through a powerful visual metaphor, Camille Vigny gives a first-person account of the domestic violence she suffered. The images and text interact with remarkable precision to convey the devastating impact of the cataclysm. It's a political gesture, brimming with courage, an icy cry that takes your breath away.

What happens when a world that relies on traffic and the logistics that allow it comes to a standstill? What happens when sickness and even death are taken from us?

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.

Five women tell their « love story ». Each of them had the wonderful experience of ‘love at first sight’ with a man that will become their downfall. The influence settles slowly but strongly. Eventually it turns to violence, protecting the children and running away. Through five poignant stories, this film shows us the chronology of a love story that ends in a drama.

At the beginning of winter, a filmmaker retires for six months to a hermit's cabin in the middle of the forest, cut off from the world and its means of communication. Through the words of four women she has filmed previously, all of whom have dedicated their lives to different forms of spirituality, she embarks on a mysterious inner adventure, on the edge of solitude and nature. A journey that invites us to connect with the world in a different way.

This film is an African “Boyhood” that gives an insight to the political and historical situation of Burundi throughout the last 24 years through the eyes of six street children that now have become adults.

In Italy, in the mid-seventies, Adriana, Barbara, Nadia and Susanna were 20 years old when they decided to join the armed struggle and leave behind their social life and their families in order to make the revolution the center and the aim of their existence. Today they have returned after many years in prison, and they try, each one of them, to recount their own experiences. They speak about the political reasons which initially sustained them, the conflicts, the doubts, and the moments of being torn apart which market out their lives as women caught up in the vortex of war. A course of events which ended in the condemnation of the armed struggle and the pain of the lives that were destroyed – their victims’ lives and their own.

Laosan, a young family man, spends all his time smoking opium. For his community, lost in the heart of the Laotian jungle, opium farming is the only way to survive. But opium is also the poison that puts men to sleep and kills their desires.

Portrait of Belgian historian, reporter and documentarian André Dartevelle.

A café in the north of Brussels. Days are punctuated by the songs that the customers sing at all hours, to amuse themselves, to remember or to pass the time. Those songs transform the place little by little, making the film a strange musical.

After losing part of her memory in an accident, Leila, a young French woman of Iraqi origin, reconstructs her story by reconnecting with her family and exploring her roots. Through music and cinema, she brings her exiled father's poems to lite, dis-covers the reality of the Middle East, and embarks on a personal quest to understand her identity and find her voice.

Documentary on the atrocities the germans committed at the start of WW I in Dinant.

Since November 2022, the Brussels prisons of Saint-Gilles, Forest and Berkendael have been moving to the brand-new "prison village" of Haren, on the outskirts of Brussels. An ultra-modern, ultra-secure, semi-private prison. But why build new prisons in the first place?

It was summer on the shores of Lake Geneva. Alice was on vacation at the campsite with her mother, she was bored. One day by chance, she met Zack in the middle of the sunflower fields. Today the summer is over. Before dying, the faded sunflowers tell us the story of this invisible love.

One night, nine children from the same Tunisian village attempt the deadly crossing. Like a poem or a prayer, this film welcomes the words of bereaved mothers and gives dignity to their grief.

The Amazon flows lazily through the goldmine-gashed landscape of northern Peru. Using real eyewitness accounts, directors Bénédicte Liénard and Mary Jiménez tell the story of a young woman who winds up in the clutches of forced prostitution when her initially hopeful attempt to escape the constrictions of her village goes wrong. Step by step, she is robbed of her moral and physical integrity. The film reconstitutes a space of dignity and returns voice and identity to a fate formally made nameless. With its powerful imagery, the girl’s traumatic odyssey embodies the destruction of life in a capitalist world in connection with horrific natural devastation.