Herman@s (Les Adelphes)

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.

Every year on the 10th of November, at 09:05 in the morning, individuals across Turkey cease all activities. Cars pull over, and pedestrians stop and stand still, in remembrance of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey), who died on this day and time in 1938. Els Opsomer captures such a moment on film.

A lonesome angler becomes witness to an eccentric idyll between a cabin boy and a mermaid. Dream or reality?

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.

This avant-garde work exposes how we hide behind a façade in times of crisis, as if nothing is wrong. Arthur Lipsett’s first collage film mixes dozens of black-and-white photographs with audio fragments of casual conversations. Occasionally, a voice preaches: “Very nice, very nice.” The film’s subtle criticism of the 1960s zeitgeist in the United States earned it an Oscar nomination.

Every form of communication involves deciphering codes. In Before Then, Mengzhu Xue attempts to confess a secret in the form of a letter in English, which she writes out phonetically in Chinese, and asks her grandmother to read out loud.

A sparing and minimal travelogue of Istanbul. A foreigner meditates on the unraveling of a relationship while moving from hotel room to hotel room. In a city simultaneously devoted to Islam and secular nationalism, she finds refuge in the frailty and severity of rituals.