The five works in Film Fest Gent’s Barbara Hammer: A Short Film Retrospective, presented in collaboration with yanco and Art Cinema OFFoff, span thirty-five years and together they demonstrate a pattern in Barbara’s work: no disguise. What she felt in her own body and what she showed on screen were often the same sensation, not translated but transmitted. In that transparency, her personal vulnerability can expand outward into something universal that extends beyond the individual body and beyond the screen.

Between Schaarbeek and Evere lies La Friche Josaphat, a unique 24-hectare green space. It was once a marshalling yard for splitting and assembling freight trains. Today, it is one of Brussels’ last refuges for biodiversity. Rare fauna and flora are constantly threatened by property developers in an increasingly urban landscape. Countless petitions and citizens’ initiatives advocate for the preservation of La Friche as Brussels’ equivalent of The Zwin Natural Park. With underneath it flickers, filmmaker lau persijn (they/them) champions the site’s appeal and ecological importance.

Love and respect for an archive cannot mean approaching it so delicately that one refuses to act upon it: every selection, montage, recollection or speculation transforms what it touches. Nor does openness mean withholding commitment. It means committing strongly enough for an encounter to answer back—for an image, voice or vanished life to resist the meaning prepared for it and perhaps alter the form built around it.

Speech for a Melting Statue by Collectif Faire-part examines a social issue that has long been a concern in Belgium—in part due to activist campaigns—but only truly made its way onto the political agenda around the time of the Black Lives Matter movement: how should we best deal with colonial monuments in public spaces?

Do you like cat videos? Try watching a thousand in a row, spread them on a timeline, and map out the similarities and differences between them. This experiment could serve as a primer for the work of two-person art collective NEOZOON, whose preoccupation is human-animal relationality. Using only found footage and social media archives, the duo aims to expose the oppressive power structures that position humans as exceptional, and non-human animals as anything but.

Adam Lewis Jacob’s Idrish (ইদ্রিস) (2021) dances between the present and the personal and political history of British-Bangladeshi community activist Muhammad Idrish. His longstanding opposition to deportation campaigns, beginning with his own, helps to understand both the anti-immigrant movement of the late 20th century and the resistance to it, at a time when echoes of these mechanisms resonate once again.

In five minutes, Paradise scans what determines movement for racially distinct peoples. Borders seek to contain, and any transgressions are preemptively curbed through restrictive legislation or bureaucratic rigmarole. As architect and researcher Shahram Khosravi and Mahmoud Keshavarz point out in their article, “The Magic of Borders”, border fortifications—materialised through visa protocols, military operations, or propaganda media—facilitate mobility for the white traveller as much as they restrict it for racialised refugees.

Returning to her great-grandparents’ home in Moldova, where her uncle sexually abused her when she was nine years old, Lucovnicova films the site of her childhood trauma with a detached ambivalence. A shot of the house’s sunlit exterior is bookended by glimpses of uncle Tudor, contesting the idyllic quality of its rural setting. “So fresh, so green,” enthuses her mother, “it’s my childhood and my youth.” Lucovnicova’s lens might capture this nostalgia, but it does not endorse the sentiment.

This Day Won’t Last carries risk in every shot; through el Salem’s urgency to film, his constraints of what he can film, the aesthetics of lo-fi phone footage, and the images captured on cheap disposable cameras. Even if the undeveloped film can contain desires and identities without danger, even if these clips do not contain immediate reveals, the images we receive are still constrained and chased by fears and threats. However, they are also an assertion of identity and belonging.

The opening gesture in 20 Handshakes for Peace (2014) by Mahdi Fleifel sets the terms for “Reclaiming Archives”, a programme in which images—official, historical, and digital—no longer function as stable records of the past. Instead, they appear as sites of staging, distortion, and loss. The films approach archives through their gaps and distortions. Found footage is shown as incomplete and shaped by the systems that produced it.

Henri Bergson believed that the phenomenon called humour arises when the material world falls short of our spiritual aspirations. Had he lived long enough to savour Chantal Akerman’s work, he could have found proof for his thesis. Not only was Akerman a gifted metteuse en scene of Chaplinesque slapstick, but how she depicted romantic love was also a source of uncontrollable chuckling, thanks to this gap between wishful dreaming and all-too-human reality.

In a series of intimate, domestic scenes that interweave the present with the past, Dhiaa Biya honours the weathered hands of a (deceased) grandmother. Through repetition of the same gestures, the hands of three generations of women merge, free from any obstacles posed by the passage of time. Is there a more beautiful part of the body than the hands to reflect on in order to rekindle the extinguished connection between head and body, a characteristic of these frenzied times?

Henry is a Girl Who Likes to Sleep finds the filmmaker once again looking back at herself, this time by orienting her gaze toward her beloved cat, the titular Henry—a chubby white feline with tricoloured splotches on her fur. Throughout the film, Marthe Peters delivers a playful voice-over addressed to Henry, drawing comparisons between their bodies, their unique habits and traits, while also questioning the love and affection she may be burdening her cat with.

As a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image, yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, together with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, critics, and scholars worldwide to participate in a first-ever poll of its kind. Invitees were asked to nominate ten audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. Through this non-academic approach to canon-building, this has led to an inspiring list of 105 titles.

Over the last thirty years, Sarah Pucill’s films have shown a sustained engagement with feminist politics, surrealist aesthetics, and the material language of cinema. Her work is connected by a visual and conceptual vocabulary that keeps evolving. Figures, motifs, and techniques reemerge—the principle of continuity is key to understanding how the artist’s work coheres, drawing strength from its self-reflection.