Flo Vanhorebeek

Foreignness always operates in varying degrees and can easily be internalised as self-exoticisation or through voluntary and involuntary alienation. Nevertheless, watching a film about your home country through a foreign gaze is always a startling experience. The images appear uncannily alien, akin to a non-native speaking in your mother tongue: no matter how impeccable their linguistic knowledge and proficiency, their intonations inevitably inhabit an absence, turning familiar words into strange, peculiar objects.

A flock of migratory birds circles through the sky at dusk. A dog does laps on the ice. A crane slowly rotates around its own axis, and the blades of a windmill move to the rhythm of the wind. Cyclepaths shows an annular movement that appears to move forward but always returns to the same starting point—a repetitive trajectory without end. Between these associative circular shapes, director Anton Cla shows the blind violence that’s been part of our society for so long, but which only recently took on high-tech proportions.

Christine Moderbachers Lettre à Mohamed (2013) is een audiovisuele brief in de puurste vorm. Door gebruik te maken van de grenzeloze mogelijkheden van het format, lijkt de film op geen enkele andere manier te kunnen bestaan. Wij, als kijkers, weten nauwelijks iets over de titulaire Mohamed. Hij heeft Tunesië verlaten, zoveel is duidelijk, en nu krijgt hij de veranderingen te zien die sindsdien in zijn land hebben plaatsgevonden, vanuit het perspectief en de opnames van zijn bevriende filmmaker.

Loveboard speaks to an era in which relationships are increasingly preserved through digital archives and the large amount of digital detritus this generates. Our personal troves of images have grown significantly in recent decades. The availability and cost of film stock constrained people to choose what to archive, and therefore, to also curate the image of their past. In this sense, digital media is counterintuitive, even antithetical to curatorship: it has the ability to seemingly conserve everything, including moments that seem utterly inconsequential, even banal, that are valued only in retrospect (if at all).

There’s something mesmerising about a bustling open-air market in a metropolis. Its space is shaped by loudness, tangled in the flux of languages and accents. Visually, colours spill across the full spectrum, as their vibrancy fuels commerce and connection. In Noonlight (1991), Kayt Schneider turns an ordinary walk through Brussels’s Zuidmarkt into a quiet study of the subtle dynamics between people, the city, and time. The gritty 16mm imagery, layered over the market’s constant white noise, leads us into a past that feels uncannily familiar.

Li’s I Don’t Feel at Home Anywhere Anymore begins at the Beijing airport and ends in a grey Brussels shopping street where the word ‘home’ is ostentatiously and tackily displayed on a large shop window. She frames her return with the cold presence of non-lieux: places that, according to French anthropologist Marc Augé, have no history or identity and do not encourage interaction. Here, everyone remains anonymous. Li places these non-lieux in stark contrast to the home. A home that is not merely synonymous with the parental home or the city where she grew up, but also arises from friendships, memories, and familiar sights and views.

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?

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.

As on any successful summer’s day, close to nothing happens. The boys compete for the girls’ attention, while the girls, for their part, see them as nothing more than little brothers. Still, they do steal glances from one another. This emptiness contrasts with a wealth of sensory experiences: gentle breezes rustling through the treetops, feet on wooden decking and a summer sun generously casting its light over everything—all of which make the season feel like the protagonist, so tangibly rendered on the big screen. But unlike how such an afternoon would actually sound, Meander is devoid of dialogue.