double bills

Oman’s vast plains look so much like Mars that they are used as a training ground for astronauts. Two local girls gaze at the starry sky like curious scientists while the astronauts philosophise about living on the Red Planet.

Sofia is panicky again. The Universe decides to contact her—an other-worldly dialogue. Jacqueline Lentzou’s short film is a planet symphony for Mars, where people dream awake and fight for love.

This satirical ethnographic film shows eating Belgians in diverse contexts. Dinner scenes at weddings, funerals, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve portray a country: loneliness and community alternate, just as wealth and poverty.

Dedicated to nutrition and the human attitude towards “production animals”, this YouTube-found footage collage provides disturbing insights into the behaviour of a Western affluent society towards animal products.

Eight thousand five hundred kilometres lie between the Amazon and the Ardennes. In his home country of Brazil, filmmaker Diego looks at the inaccessible forest from the outside. Its Belgian counterpiece, however, is easier to explore.

In 20th-century Colombia, resistance fighter Yarokamena, a member of the indigenous Uitoto tribe, called for rebellion against violent exploitation of the rubber mining industry in the Amazone and invoked the spiritual powers of war.

An introspective essay about the search for a place between reality and imagination: a placeless place made up out of dreams and a longing for fluidity. Slowly, the grains of the compressed image become the sands of the atopic beach, revealing an imaginary place.

Punk author Kathy Acker’s work is the starting point for a conversation about gender identity and body transformation and is linked to the punk movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

A gentle, middle-aged man returns to the nudist colony he grew up in to visit his elderly mother. Her sudden death leaves Willy in a state of sadness. He soon finds himself lost in the midst of a savage wilderness, trying to find comfort.

A woman trips and falls while rushing around the house. She gets up only to discover that her home has unusual features—it is built from paradoxes, filled with illusions, and covered with patterns.

In this urgent diary film about longing for freedom and community, the filmmaker reflects on the individual yet collective experience of growing up queer in Tunisia today.

In this cyberpunk animation, four creatures wobble like marionettes in a black void. An alien power tries to subdue them; police voices strike as if they were truncheons, but these vulnerable bodies start to fight back.

Dilan pays with her life for her forbidden love for a young man in a neighbouring village—a powerful poetic portrait of an honour killing in the rural Kurdish southeast of Turkey.

Symen and Sam pass their time in the monotony of a post-industrial suburb. They seem to linger in a kind of perpetual twilight countered by the invisible presence of ‘hardcore’. While gaming, they end up searching for the core of their desires.

A portrait of contemporary suburban youth seeking to invent new contours of collective identity, against the backdrop of France in the throes of recession.

The Brazilian trans woman Gisberta lived as an immigrant in Portugal. After she was brutally murdered, she became an icon for the transgender rights cause.

Mexico, October 2011. A mysterious dream gives birth to Cuco, a transgender latex pirate activist. This essayistic film follows their quest to create more recognition for the queer community.

Two siblings roam the mystical landscapes of Colombia, searching for their dead father's spirit. Their journey takes them from the city of Bogotá to the jungle, through realms of thought and deep into their haunted dreams.

After going missing, a woman is unable to remember her past until her former husband pays her a visit and she recalls a memory of where she lived with the man a long time ago.

In Athens, five youngsters avoid waiting for an empty future by seeking entertainment in the luxurious Airbnb establishments that one of them is cleaning for a meagre fee.

This is the story of Copa-Loca. Paulina is the girl at the heart of this abandoned Greek summer resort. Everyone cares for her and she cares about everyone – in every possible way.

A journey through the consciousness of a woman whose country is under threat from a fascist government.

The thaw of the so-called eternal snow of Páramo, a neotropical alpine ecosystem in the high Andes, exposes a layer of meaning about the origins and survival of the landscape.

A portrait of young skateboarders growing up in a Flemish suburban town. We meet different characters as they go about their daily routines: riding their skateboards, hanging out, daydreaming.

Portrait of a young teenager with mental health issues who is passionate about karate. They wander around a housing estate in East Kent, locked in verbal and physical battles with a hallucinatory demon.

In a container, sitting between crates of merchandise, two men talk about their exile. Their stories about the crossing of endless borders come together in a common dream: to reach England.

Intimate, emotional, and sometimes violent moments of farewell: men, women, and children leave their homes for an (unknown) future as migrants.

Following a fictional group of refugees across Europe, the film questions the overproduction of images surrounding real-life tragedies and deaths.

A film about highways, tourists, concrete picnic tables, and lukewarm melons. About a man who wants to leave and a child who stops him. A summer movie.

Ana’s life changes radically when she divorces at the age of 40. In front of her family, it gets harder every day to keep pretending everything is fine.

A ship drifts in the middle of an endless sea. Aboard is a crew of five. They all cope with boredom — some by trying to overpower it; others by escaping into a parallel world guided by dreams.

An audiovisual meditation on the fin de siècle in Thailand.