Calendar

Almost a decade after her in 2022 crowned “best film of all time”, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman made the twelve-minute I’m Hungry, I’m Cold. In it, two young chain-smoking Brussels girls run away from home to Paris.

The rushed adolescents speak fleetingly, as if there is no time to waste. Their recklessness is reminiscent of Akerman's own demeanour in her very first short film Blow Up My Town (1968), in which she turns the domestic household tasks, traditionally assigned to women, upside down. In I’m Hungry, I’m Cold, Akerman depicts young women who seem to be cut from the same cloth: hungry, playful, with a sense of rebellion.

I’m Hungry, I’m Cold is part of the anthology film Paris vu par... vingt ans après, in which filmmakers Philippe Garrel, Frédéric Mitterrand and Vincent Nordon also canned a short vignette around Parisian life.

During her vacation in Cuba in 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power, Agnès Varda made a photo report about Cuban society and culture after the revolution. As the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos didn’t grant her permission to shoot a film, instead, back home, she worked with her thousands of pictures. 

This delightful black-and-white composition, described by Varda as “a mixture of socialism and cha-cha-cha,” makes the edit resemble a choreography and intermingles the photos with catchy Cuban rhythms. Varda also exploresthe effects of the revolution on Cuba's people.

It is 2007. Moroccan writer and filmmaker Abdellah Taïa wanders through Cairo. His impatient handycam scans the Egyptian city and captures its people. Film posters line the streets. Television romances populate tea houses and sewing workshops. Sleepy commuters and playing children. His friendship with film legend Youssef Chahine. The jalabiya of Hissine. And that one cinema, where Omar held his hand.

Eighteen years later, Taïa looks back on the memories he and his lost love shared in the city. In his reassembly of the old footage, Cairo is an intimate labyrinth in which to remember and get lost. He searches and longs for Omar in every frame. The way in which Taïa made his footage feels like a bad omen that seemed to seal the melancholic fate of his current quest back then already. Camera movements feel aimless and lost; they never seem quite sure where to look. Their texture is flat and its colours washed out. Through on-screen text addressed to Omar himself, Taïa asks where he is now. “You’ve changed your phone number, Omar. But I have to find you. I love you.”

In Sawyer Avenue, Sunday Afternoon, Bill Morrison presents a chronology of an ICE raid in Chicago and the civil resistance that follows it. A found-footage collage of mobile phone and bodycam footage, identical to the maelstrom in the news and on social media, shows how three masked officers cold-bloodedly throw a Latin American man to the ground, handcuff him, and drag him into an unmarked pick-up van. All of this in broad daylight.

Soon, the whole neighbourhood is in turmoil. Protesting neighbours in dressing gowns, cyclists and other motorists do everything they can to stop them. They shout, film, throw insults, until an officer slams his foot down on the gas pedal and drives over a bystander’s foot. “Why are you doing this?” asks the abducted man in Spanish. The officers are Latino too. They shrug.

Morrison’s editing is efficient and virtually devoid of commentary. He intervenes only as a collector, bringing together different camera angles. Apart from some on-screen text that contextualises the situation, he needs no words to show that Operation Midway Blitz—as the Trump regime calls this crackdown—is nothing more than a showy title designed to sugarcoat fascist, unpunished abuse of power. Sawyer Avenue, Sunday Afternoon offers a frustrating, poignant, and, above all, humane observation of just one of thousands of similar interventions.

Charel, a bored, balding man in his fifties, still lives with his mother. The clumsy bachelor sees in her pet—a bass in a fishbowl that is far too small—the grandchild he never could give her. When he drunkenly impales the animal on a pitchfork, he sets out to find a worthy replacement. In his utter incompetence, he ends up antagonising the deeply religious villagers.

Jack-of-all-trades Filip Anthonissen sculpts, animates, and edits his 3D characters like an old-school puppeteer in the devilishly funny Milk. He pushes the zany expressions and slapstick antics of Charel and his gang to the limits of what feels human, but stops short of crossing that line. In the uncanny valley that this creates, their emotions are more of an enlarged imitation than an internalisation of them. Wind instruments that serve as vocal sounds, combined with a Romanian sung dance track, reinforce this effect. Vulgarity, mystery, and visual humour reign in this fever dream of a film.

“Tonight, we are dressing up for fun. As scary goblins and skeletons. As witches and devils and things we’ve never seen. That’s what we do on Halloween.” Speaking in rhymes here is Peter Henry “skeleton” Wilcox. The American lad dresses up for an annual round of trick-or-treating with his school friends in this black-and-white public service announcement, filmed in 1960. However, their night’s haul won’t benefit themselves. With a UNICEF collection box and pickets in hand, they'll raise money for children in the Global South suffering from famine.

Stunningly choreographed night scenes of costumed children at play make Scary Time a technically impressive film, but Clarke and Hughes’ uncomfortable parallel edit makes it truly stand out. Cheerful images and sounds of the well-off Henry and his schoolmates constantly alternate with those of crying, undernourished children. While the American children can take refuge in the safety of their scary tradition, the directing duo offers a sobering view of a different kind of fear that is close to impossible for them to imagine.

The dialectic that arises between the two isn’t particularly subtle, but no less effective. Some necessary breathing room is given through a cross-cultural dance montage. Scary Time is an undeniably difficult watch with an outdated geopolitical worldview, but within a film-historical context, the techniques and audacity employed by Hughes and Clarke make it a remarkable time capsule.

According to Peggy Ahwesh, there is beauty and ecstasy in decay. With her 16mm blow-up of a pornographic Super 8 film, the American artist seeks sensuality. The discarded stag reel has mould stains, scratches, and cracks, but these also add colour. Rot adds something lustful to the performative sex scenes that paint over the mould and dance to melancholic tango.

A motionless, bloodied man lies naked on a bed beneath this kaleidoscopic splendour. Two women kiss his flaccid member and caress it with a knife. The perverse sexual fantasy, though difficult to decipher due to abrasion, unquestionably caters to the male gaze. Ahwesh’s montage emphasises this by slowing down and repeating explicit close-ups. Her intervention, which she dedicates to sexploitation icon Doris Wishman, feels like a welcome critique of the superficial source material.

He may never have enjoyed the fame of a Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut, but many regarded Jacques Rozier as their equal. In his second short film, Rentrée des classes, a little boy throws his school bag into the river on the first day of school, which leads to a thrilling adventure.

Rozier interweaves reality with dreamlike elaborations, demonstrating a fondness for storytelling as if between brackets. Rentrée des classes is a mischievous and carefree stroll, a childlike fantasy.

Summer in the south of France. In François Truffaut’s debut film, the young and beautiful Bernadette cycles over the bridges and through the scrublands of Nîmes. In the local amphitheatre, she throws herself into Bernard’s arms. But they’re never alone. Wherever they go, five mistons (local slang for brats) are hot on their heels. They see Bernadette as the embodiment of their budding, prepubescent desires. Jealousy drives them to mischief: “Too young to love Bernadette, we decided to hate and torment her.”

Truffaut sowed the seeds for his future career with this book adaptation of Maurice Pons’ Virginales. Their Calimero Complex and their behaviours that stem from it feel genuine and true to life. Truffaut beautifully channels that spontaneity through the black-and-white visuals and post-synchronised soundtrack. His tracking shots feel more like an observation of the group dynamics than an intentional mise-en-scène. Les Mistons is therefore a fine precursor to The 400 Blows, in which he returns to the same approach and style.

Iranian filmmaker and poet-photographer Abbas Kiarostami was an important figure in 20th-century film history. In 1969, he was invited to set up Kunan’s film department, which was then called the Center for the Intellectual Development of Child and Adolescent. Many of the films from that period, including later Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) and Homework (1988), are primarily set in schools and classrooms. His first educational films laid the foundation for his future style of filmmaking.

In So Can I, he combines live-action and animation. While two schoolboys watch animated animals (such as jumping kangaroos and swimming fish) on TV, one boy says, “I can do that too,” and then imitates the actions. Kiarostami’s son Ahmad plays the second, silent boy.

The end of the film is especially beautiful: the boy fails to imitate a flying bird, let alone a plane flying overhead.

Ignacio Agüero’s remarkable documentary starts as a tender portrait of influential film historian and activist Alicia Vega teaching a film history workshop to impoverished youth in Santiago. Gradually, the film transforms into a devastating critique of the Pinochet regime by shifting focus to Vega’s young students and their families. In touching scenes, Agüero shows their cramped quarters as a poignant expression of their denizens’ aspirations and vulnerabilities.

Censors struggled to explain why they restricted the film to viewers over twenty-one years old, because this clearly confirms Agüero’s film and Vega’s workshop expose: the deliberate stratification of class through poverty and lack of education, imposed by the dictatorship. One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train also shows how cinema—both Agüero’s and the ‘films’ made of paper and glue by the children—can be a gateway to the knowledge and perspective that one day may lead to freedom.

Sicily, 1954. Vittorio De Seta and the morning sun cast silhouettes of fishermen onto the legendary Ferrania colour film. Two small wooden boats sail across the Strait of Messina. Beneath the water’s surface, swordfish swim towards them. They are right on time for the breeding season but unaware of the throwing spear that awaits them. Women wash clothes on the banks and sing traditional work songs to ease that hard labour. In the evening, the whole village gathers to celebrate the catch. A few years later, mass emigration wipes this centuries-old culture and its traditions off the map.

Despite its vivid blue and orange colours, The Age of Swordfish feels like a documentary elegy to a way of life that no longer exists. But this was never De Seta’s intention: with the ten short films he made in the region, he sought to do nothing more than capture the place and its people truthfully. He recorded sound directly on location, despite the Italian studio system’s dubbing tradition, and kept the crew small to preserve a natural atmosphere. Within this neorealist style, he injects a sense of playfulness through sharp editing. His film feels more like a time capsule than an indictment. Martin Scorsese sums it up beautifully: “De Seta is an anthropologist with the eye of a poet.”

French filmmaker Agnès Varda, originally born in Ixelles, died in 2019 at the age of 90, only weeks after the world premiere of her last film, Varda par Agnès. Although often overlooked for a long time in the shadow of her male French New Wave contemporaries, her work was equally crucial to the influential film movement.

Du côté de la côte was one of her very first (short) films, commissioned by the French Tourism Office, and at the time dedicated to leading French film theorist André Bazin. In the saturated film, Varda captures 1950s tourism on the Côte d'Azur: clear skies, burning sun, and cheeky parasols. A touristic tour on the French Riviera’s exoticism, full of captivating imagery, bathed in an atmosphere of nostalgia. Characteristic of Varda’s idiosyncratic style, the glorifying postcards come with some quips, hinting at the end of summer and the loss of such a tourist paradise.

While in San Francisco to promote her latest film, Agnès Varda gets a tip from an acquaintance. In Sausalito, a town in the San Francisco Bay Area, there lives a Greek painter named Jean Varda. Could they be related?

As soon as they meet, they discover this is not only the case, but that they are also kindred spirits. Enthusiastic about the encounter, Varda quickly finds a 35mm camera and, over the course of two days, films a playful portrait of ‘Uncle Yanco’—who is actually her cousin, whom she had never heard of before.

This meeting of two creative minds is reenacted in multiple takes in French, English, and Greek. They view the world through an imaginative and colorful lens. With his drooping mustache and pastel pink sweater, bohemian bon vivant Yanco guides Varda, and the viewer, through his universe, including the hippies who group around him, his collage-like paintings of Byzantine cities, and his deep love of the sea.

Ulysse tells the story of a photograph that Varda took as a young woman, which is also presented here. The film acts as an inquiry into the image: its significance in her life, and the lives of the models.

Taken on a beach in Calais, France in 1954, the photograph shows three subjects—a man, a boy, and a dead goat. Through the film, we learn that the young boy, Ulysse, is the son of political refugees—then neighbours of Varda—from the Spanish Civil War. Revisiting this image almost thirty years later, Varda interrogates her memories of the moment the photograph was taken, revealing some discomfort. Alongside, she explores the wider context of that day in 1954: her own life, and her transition from filmmaking to photography; her experience before and after becoming a mother; and the wider context of current affairs, from France’s V-Day (leading to eventual US involvement in Vietnam), to the introduction of television in France. Touching upon her own life and the political situations of the time, the film raises questions about the impact of images on our collective and individual memory.

Varda began her career as a photographer before moving into cinema and coining the term ‘cinécriture’ to describe her unique method of storytelling; at once playful, curious, and political. Ulysse typifies this style perfectly, the intertwining narrative combining Varda’s self-reflexive memories and emotions with the historical details and personal circumstances of the subjects on the beach.

Almost a decade after her in 2022 crowned “best film of all time”, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman made the twelve-minute I’m Hungry, I’m Cold. In it, two young chain-smoking Brussels girls run away from home to Paris.

The rushed adolescents speak fleetingly, as if there is no time to waste. Their recklessness is reminiscent of Akerman's own demeanour in her very first short film Blow Up My Town (1968), in which she turns the domestic household tasks, traditionally assigned to women, upside down. In I’m Hungry, I’m Cold, Akerman depicts young women who seem to be cut from the same cloth: hungry, playful, with a sense of rebellion.

I’m Hungry, I’m Cold is part of the anthology film Paris vu par... vingt ans après, in which filmmakers Philippe Garrel, Frédéric Mitterrand and Vincent Nordon also canned a short vignette around Parisian life.

“Dear Henry, I love you, and I love who I am when I am with you, with our small heads and our constant longing for sleep, or at least for a horizontal life.” The filmmaker seeks in her beloved cat Henry something soft and tender to inhabit, a little fur to retreat into. Between bedsheets and freckles, a love declaration emerges. This fragile collage traces a pathway between intimacy, vulnerability, and warmth. An ode to the intimate worlds where we learn to live and to rest.

Pol Gasco Robles, a slick Spanish adolescent, presents himself in flashy neon light as the protagonist of this documentary portrait. The wall of his bedroom is decorated with photos of luxury holidays, expensive villas, and flashy Lamborghinis. If it glistens, it’s something to aspire for. For Robles, material luxury is not a by-product of success, but a goal in itself. Anonymous voices in podcasts or YouTube videos assure him that he will get there through mere manifestation. On the cracked screen of his smartphone, he checks his trades. The balance stands at $406.68.

Robles is enchanted by the golden mountains that tech capitalists and crypto bros promise him online. It is easy to dismiss such a hollow can-do mentality as naïve, but Hernandez portrays his situation with nuance, employing a visual language that reflects the current zeitgeist.

A 3D scan of Robles’ bedroom transforms into a web of binary digits and cables, an AI model falters to bring his dream villa to life, and green screens place him in his favourite car. She asks him critical questions whilst the camera rolls, pushing him towards introspection, even though he never quite gets there.

Visual artist Nicola L. was born in Morocco and worked in Paris, Brussels, New York, and Ibiza, where she developed a community-oriented artistic practice that occupied a unique place within the post-war avant-garde. From the late 1960s onwards, she created a distinct body of work comprising soft sculptures, immersive environments, and participatory performances in which touch and collective experience became central artistic principles. 

Immersed in the community of artists and local residents on the island, Nicola L. approached Ibiza as a living landscape, shaped by mythology and shared experiences. In the film Les têtes d’Ibiza, fiction, performance, and documentary observation flow seamlessly into one another, transforming the island into a place of freedom, imagination, and collective expression. She produced this work during her time in Ibiza in the 1960s and 1970s.

There, Nicola L. became fascinated by two headless statues at the entrance to the old town. At first, she thought they had been damaged by time or invasions, but later she climbed a ladder to examine them closely: “I realise that there is no break but that the cut at the bottom of the neck is very smooth… and lets glimpse inside a hole that seems to wait for the impaling of a head.” From that observation, she developed a fictional investigation into the missing heads. 

Given Ibiza’s history of successive rulers, the heads might have been detachable and interchangeable. It seems that they were golden and buried somewhere in the island, Nicola L. writes in her memoir. That idea forms the starting point for a broader narrative structure in which imagination and oral history intertwine. She constructs a series of imagined interviews with island inhabitants using the mystery as a way to map the social and cultural landscape of Ibiza in the 1970s, before mass tourism fully transformed it. 

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh’s colourful, low-resolution imagery searches for indigenous plants, ravaged by settlement colonialism. More than a condemnation, Hamadeh’s docu-essay feels like a reappraisal of the (political) power that lies within crops like deerhorn and sumac. The medicinal properties of their leaves and roots in the cuisines and landscapes of both Native Americans and Palestinians—represented here on a sparse soundtrack by Linda Deer and Raya Ziada—serve as a bridge connecting their peoples from a distance.

Despite the often contextless close-ups, the personal experiences of the two women feel like an alternative biology lesson—untouched by a dominant Western view on medicine. Their herbarium does not contain hydrogel for burns, but staghorn fern. Sumac harvesting is practical knowledge, not an internet search term. Their connection with nature is one that Westerners have long forgotten. It testifies to a greater self-reliance that must be preserved at all costs. Ziada phrases it as such: “If we don't have sovereignty over our food, we’ll always be dominated.”

The work of filmmaker and artist Shellie Fleming span­ned a wide ran­ge of forms: films, instal­la­ti­ons, street art, books, and pho­to­grap­hy. Much of her work had an ephe­me­ral and time-bound charac­ter, lea­ving only rem­nants today. For Fleming, her life was her art, and the phy­si­cal objects she cre­a­ted were not always inten­ded to be pre­ser­ved or, by exten­si­on, to be sha­red with a wider audience.

In Devotio Moderna, Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips” both structures and undermines the work. Fleming decon­structs the poem and cre­a­tes new word com­bi­na­ti­ons—pri­ma­ri­ly with the terms “fle­sh,” “sto­ne” and “light”—that trans­form the poem so as to align with Fleming’s audio­vi­su­al visi­on. The poe­try can be heard, seen, and felt in Devotio Moderna, which beco­mes a high­ly phy­si­cal, tan­gi­ble expe­rien­ce that is ampli­fied lay­er by lay­er. The tit­le of the film refers to a reli­gious prac­ti­ce in which col­lec­ti­ve pray­ing is exchan­ged for a more personal, gent­le, inner prayer. 

“Despite the fact that the poem is about ill­ness and is expres­sed in dark lan­gu­a­ge… fun­da­men­tal­ly… Devotio Moderna is about light. Luminosity,” Fleming concludes.

Vukica Đilas’s naked body cuts towards Andy Warhol’s flower paintings. Images of baby chickens that run through the living room. Billboards in New York, bridges in Paris. On TV, Looney Tunes and archive footage of the Olympics. Through a mix of stop motion and long takes, Vukica Đilas compiles an encyclopedia of the mundane, spanning almost thirty years and filled with memories of loved ones, travels, and sociopolitical sidelines. 

More than once, it is those loved ones who turn the lens towards her own body and life as well. Unlike her politically militant parents, Đilas stays far away from any social commentary. Her observations are like those of a child, awed by her surroundings and the details they reveal. Through her eyes, her mother isn’t a revolutionary, but a frail, knitting old woman. 

During her lifetime, Đilas moved in Yugoslav avant-garde circles as a journalist and art critic, not as a filmmaker. The remnants of her personal time capsule are discovered only after her death in a repository where she also kept some texts of Jonas Mekas, her great inspiration. Such as: “I make home movies—therefore I live. I live—therefore I make home movies.” Dilas’s intimate archive, re-edited here by her dear friend and filmmaker Slobodan Šijan, and accompanied by newly recorded piano music, shows her passionate embrace of Mekas’s credo. This was her only film. 

Three years after the publication of Marguerite Duras’ children’s book Ah! Ernesto, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet pull the titular protagonist from its pages for an unconventional retelling of the short story. In their black-and-white stylistic experiment, nine-year-old Ernesto declares that he no longer wants to go to school, to the dismay of his parents and the school principal. His reasoning? He only learns things there that he doesn’t know. For Straub and Huillet, young Ernesto’s truancy is a vehicle for challenging the convention of translating literature to cinema.

Although the two filmmakers stay true to Duras’ original words, they deprioritise plot and suspense to give centre stage to emotions, or rather the lack thereof. Straub and Huillet strip their actors of all of this and let them perform almost out of boredom: their tone of voice is atonal, and facial expressions are non-existent. As a result of this, Ernesto himself seems possessed by a self-assured arrogance. 

Straub and Huillet reinforce this deliberate discomfort in their cinematography and editing, starting and ending their shots too early or too late, which emphasises exaggerated physical gestures. In everything they do, the duo seeks an alternative route to convey Duras’ plot to the viewer.

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh’s colourful, low-resolution imagery searches for indigenous plants, ravaged by settlement colonialism. More than a condemnation, Hamadeh’s docu-essay feels like a reappraisal of the (political) power that lies within crops like deerhorn and sumac. The medicinal properties of their leaves and roots in the cuisines and landscapes of both Native Americans and Palestinians—represented here on a sparse soundtrack by Linda Deer and Raya Ziada—serve as a bridge connecting their peoples from a distance.

Despite the often contextless close-ups, the personal experiences of the two women feel like an alternative biology lesson—untouched by a dominant Western view on medicine. Their herbarium does not contain hydrogel for burns, but staghorn fern. Sumac harvesting is practical knowledge, not an internet search term. Their connection with nature is one that Westerners have long forgotten. It testifies to a greater self-reliance that must be preserved at all costs. Ziada phrases it as such: “If we don't have sovereignty over our food, we’ll always be dominated.”

A cat is half-sleeping, half-listening to Federico Mompou’s “Pájaro triste”. This first tape in Chris Marker’s Bestiaire trilogy, a series of short films devoted exclusively to animals, features his beloved cat, Guillaume-en-Egypte, in his “most widely acclaimed” screen role. As Marker recalls, “he was fond of Ravel (any cat is), but he had a special crush on Mompou. That day (a beautiful sunny day, I remember) I placed Volume I of the complete “Mompou by Mompou” on the CD player to please him…”. 

In The Black Tower, we enter the world of a man haunted by a tower which, he believes, is following him around London.  While the character of the central protagonist is indicated only by a narrative voice-over which takes us from unease to breakdown to mysterious death, the images, meticulously controlled and articulated, deliver a series of colour-coded puzzles, jokes, and puns which pull the viewer into a mind-teasing engagement.

John Smith’s assurance and skill as a filmmaker undercuts the notion of the avant-garde as dry, unprofessional, and dull, and in The Black Tower, we have an example of a film that plays with the emotions as well as the language of film.

“Blight was made in collaboration with composer Jocelyn Pook. It revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition. Until 1994, when our houses were destroyed, both the composer and I lived on the route of this road. The images in the film are a selective record of some of the changes that occurred in the area over a two-year period, from the demolition of houses through to the start of motorway building work. The soundtrack incorporates natural sounds associated with these events together with speech fragments taken from recorded conversations with local people.

Although the film is entirely constructed from records of real events, Blight is not a straightforward documentary. The film constructs stories from unconnected fragments of sound and image, bringing disparate reminiscences and contemporary events together. Like much of my earlier work, Blight exploits the ambiguities of its material to produce new meanings and metaphors, fictionalising reality through framing and editing strategies. The emotive power of music is used in the film to overtly aid this invention, investing mundane images with artificial importance. A specific ‘real’  context for the depicted events only becomes apparent at the end of the film. What is presented is simultaneously fact and fiction.”

Life is no cakewalk for the star of this film: an Arabian camel. He spends hours walking in circles in a dark and stifling sesame mill. When at last he has a break and gets the chance to rest his neck, goats and chickens walk over his fatigued body—they’re playful, but no less irritating for that. What can he do but dream of a different kind of life?

Director Ibrahim Shaddad graduated in 1964 from the film academy in Potsdam, Germany. Artistic freedom in his homeland of Sudan was limited by the dictatorship, which meant film culture was almost non-existent. He became one of the founders of the Sudanese Film Group, which used activism and humor to inject new life into cinema in his country.

As a viewer, you can choose to draw a parallel between the emotional life of the captive camel, dreaming of freedom, and that of the filmmakers who are trapped by censorship. Shaddad’s interplay of light and sound makes the suffering of this majestic animal all the more palpable, while also allowing for moments of humor.

Letters from a Palestinian woman living in war-torn Lebanon to her daughter, whom she has not seen for years, and a series of photographs convey the effects of war and exile on their personal and cultural life, with a nuanced look at family relationships.

Measures of Distance is an uncharacteristically autobiographical work that, in Mona Hatoum’s words, speaks of displacement, disorientation, and a tremendous sense of loss. Hatoum was born to Palestinian parents living in exile in Beirut. In 1975, while visiting London, Hatoum became an exile herself; war broke out in Lebanon, and she stayed in England. 

In this video, the artist overlays footage of her mother with scrolling Arabic script—the text of letters Hatoum’s mother wrote to her, which the artist reads aloud in English. This soundtrack is interspersed with candid dialogues between mother and daughter.

“Okay, there we go,” Julia Mellen declares in front of a webcam, her cat in her arms.  The Madrid-based Brazilian-American goes all out in her DIY-animated retelling of a garden party full of misfits that she organised at the age of twenty, following a successful (second) abortion. She’s not squeamish about poking fun at herself. Despite—or perhaps because of—her audiovisual bricolage, Mellen manages to embed herself seamlessly into the culture and slang of the digital generation, anno brat era.

Mellen talks at breakneck speed. She recorded her canned voice on an iPhone because her sole pair of batteries needed to be shared between her keyboard and vibrator. The frame of her webcam nervously floats in all directions, and her animated 3D characters are often constructed from triangles, squares, and trapezoids. The result resembles a PowerPoint presentation, complete with crazy text animations. The chaotic Abortion Party is wildly funny but also painfully relevant, as Mellen herself concludes. “I didn’t think I was going to make this film anymore, but unfortunately it’s become topical again (...) Y’all love that.”

Paris, France. A boat glides slowly past the banks of the Seine. From the bow of the vessel, we see industrial sites. Cars drive along the quays and across many bridges: Pont d’Austerlitz, Pont National, Pont Neuf, Pont Alexandre III. Curious silhouettes watch the river from their pavements. On the voice track, Aurélia Steiner addresses a letter to a traceless love(r). “Où êtes-vous?”, she asks politely. The hum of the engine carries her silences. Beyond that, there is little else. Melbourne is miles away.

In this fictional epistolary film, writer Marguerite Duras, a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War and partner to a Holocaust survivor, uses her titular alter ego to voice a deeply personal grief. Through geographical dislocation, she creates a poetic distance in order to speak about historical trauma and exile. Although her literary observations often cover very mundane subjects (her scrawny cat, wilting roses), her interplay of words and images here suggests that the reasons for her broken heart are much more profound.

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh’s colourful, low-resolution imagery searches for indigenous plants, ravaged by settlement colonialism. More than a condemnation, Hamadeh’s docu-essay feels like a reappraisal of the (political) power that lies within crops like deerhorn and sumac. The medicinal properties of their leaves and roots in the cuisines and landscapes of both Native Americans and Palestinians—represented here on a sparse soundtrack by Linda Deer and Raya Ziada—serve as a bridge connecting their peoples from a distance.

Despite the often contextless close-ups, the personal experiences of the two women feel like an alternative biology lesson—untouched by a dominant Western view on medicine. Their herbarium does not contain hydrogel for burns, but staghorn fern. Sumac harvesting is practical knowledge, not an internet search term. Their connection with nature is one that Westerners have long forgotten. It testifies to a greater self-reliance that must be preserved at all costs. Ziada phrases it as such: “If we don't have sovereignty over our food, we’ll always be dominated.”

There’s something serene yet sad in the air of the apartment that seventy-year-old Kaki shares with her Nepalese domestic helper Malti. Their window frames look out onto the Indian Ocean. The seawater and the cat begging for food fill the rooms with noise and purring. In voice-over, the women muse about jasmine flowers and rotten fruit that are supposed to bring their absent loved ones closer. This prosaic comfort—more a daydream than a real anecdote—never leads to visible tears. Yet their whispering voices eloquently express the longing and lonely mourning that filmmaker Payal Kapadia assigns to them.

Kapadia conveys more meaning in her meditative image and sound montage than in the narrative she uses. Serene household and kitchen sounds, bright blacks and vivid ochres cover the emotional load here. A verbatim narrative feels secondary. The titular clouds reveal themselves only through the smoke that (vermin?) exterminators chase through the corridors. Scans of watercolour drawings mingle with Kapadia’s images. Her patient way of looking gives both the characters and the viewer time to hang their heads.

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh’s colourful, low-resolution imagery searches for indigenous plants, ravaged by settlement colonialism. More than a condemnation, Hamadeh’s docu-essay feels like a reappraisal of the (political) power that lies within crops like deerhorn and sumac. The medicinal properties of their leaves and roots in the cuisines and landscapes of both Native Americans and Palestinians—represented here on a sparse soundtrack by Linda Deer and Raya Ziada—serve as a bridge connecting their peoples from a distance.

Despite the often contextless close-ups, the personal experiences of the two women feel like an alternative biology lesson—untouched by a dominant Western view on medicine. Their herbarium does not contain hydrogel for burns, but staghorn fern. Sumac harvesting is practical knowledge, not an internet search term. Their connection with nature is one that Westerners have long forgotten. It testifies to a greater self-reliance that must be preserved at all costs. Ziada phrases it as such: “If we don't have sovereignty over our food, we’ll always be dominated.”

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh’s colourful, low-resolution imagery searches for indigenous plants, ravaged by settlement colonialism. More than a condemnation, Hamadeh’s docu-essay feels like a reappraisal of the (political) power that lies within crops like deerhorn and sumac. The medicinal properties of their leaves and roots in the cuisines and landscapes of both Native Americans and Palestinians—represented here on a sparse soundtrack by Linda Deer and Raya Ziada—serve as a bridge connecting their peoples from a distance.

Despite the often contextless close-ups, the personal experiences of the two women feel like an alternative biology lesson—untouched by a dominant Western view on medicine. Their herbarium does not contain hydrogel for burns, but staghorn fern. Sumac harvesting is practical knowledge, not an internet search term. Their connection with nature is one that Westerners have long forgotten. It testifies to a greater self-reliance that must be preserved at all costs. Ziada phrases it as such: “If we don't have sovereignty over our food, we’ll always be dominated.”

A Trip to the Moon is based on two popular novels from that period: From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne and The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells. The black-and-white science fiction film from 1902 has since become a canonical work. The French film was hugely popular upon its original release and used animation and visual effects that were very innovative at the time. 

During a meeting of astronomers, their chairman proposes a trip to the moon. After some opposition, six brave astronauts agree to the plan. They built a bullet-shaped capsule and a huge cannon to shoot it into space. A group of ‘marines’ (mostly women in sailor suits) launch the contraption. The man on the moon sees the capsule approaching, and it hits him in the eye—one of the most famous shots in film history.

Like many other films by Méliès, A Trip to the Moon was sold in both black-and-white and hand-coloured versions. The only known hand-coloured copy was rediscovered in 1993 and later restored. This restored version finally premiered in Cannes in 2011, 109 years after its original release.

“Sit up straight... careful... yes, like that.” In Emmanuel Marre’s vérité film, not the filmmaker or his camcorder  dictate the mise-en-scène, but an alternating montage of Brussels-based parents styling their children’s hair with whatever they have at hand. Their direct but intimate instructions and the bathrooms, kitchens and living rooms that function as ephemeral hair salons sculpt the decor, rhythm, and imagery.

A mother cuts her panicking son’s hair with kitchen scissors. A father shaves a mohawk with clippers and quiet devotion. A daughter twitches in pain as a coarse brush rakes roughly into her frizzy hair. Meanwhile, cultural differences are revealed through the created hairstyles and the pathways taken to get there.

Marre’s frames feel their way into the small spaces he co-inhabits. He is a fly on the wall, but not invisible. He adapts where necessary and isn’t bothered by sound equipment or his own shadow in the frame. The children, forced to sit still and yet unaware of the behavioural rules imposed by a film shoot, acknowledge the lens staring at them. A special triad emerges between them, the maker, and the moment they share together.

Panning shots in a repeating full-circle movement show a room as a succession of still lives: a chair, some fruit on a table, a collection of solitary, waiting objects. When the camera first passes the bedroom, there is no one there, but each time it returns to the frame, filmmaker Chantal Akerman herself is sitting on the bed, motionless at first, then busy with an apple.  When she is last seen, she yawns.

Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s How Are You? takes us to Roccapina, a paradise in minor key. In this hybrid 3D animated film, a pseudo-intellectual menagerie reflects on the contemporary political landscape on the other side of the Corsican Sea through dry wit and Disney fonts. Hope for progress is a scarce commodity, as the highly cuddly animals surrender to passivity.

In her podcast, for instance, FanFan the literate elephant reflects on a revolution she will never start herself. A murderous penguin answers every question with “je sais pas”. Ideas that could turn the tide emerge aplenty from FanFan’s cosy monobloc chairs, but transforming theory into action is a bridge too far for everyone.

Through their use of irony, Poggi and Vinel evoke an overwhelming sense of fatalism and inertia. Mankind is facing emptiness. Ignorance prevails over knowledge. Every news item is food for debate, rarely a call to action. Societal change is long overdue, but we seem to remain politically inert beings deliberately.

How do you abstract the death of a loved one? What texture do you give it? What colour? Does it remain formless, or can you recognise what remains? After the loss of his father, LUCA alumnus Brecht De Cock sculpted a transmedial response to these impossible questions. After receiving a message urging him to come home as soon as possible, De Cock pulls out all the stops and crystallises immeasurable grief from a dark vacuum.

A computer mouse scrolls over a negative image of a paramedic's scissors and first aid kit. A 3D rendering of a living room slowly but surely floods with undulating water. Digital threads, like those of a spider's web, intertwine and disintegrate. On the soundtrack, Ismaël Iken and Vince De Leenheer produce a shrill digital sound that creeps between your ears and under your clothes. De Cock does not give anything away on a silver platter, but the pain is palpable in everything.