Paradise

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.

Pierre, 25 years old and on a scholarship for a prestigious Parisian university, is lodged by Francine, who is 75, disabled, and confined to her wheelchair. Both puzzled and disoriented, they witness the French presidential elections of 2017 play out.

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.

Through dancing, The Motherfucker’s Birthday shows the evil of the dictator and the horror people endure under powerful political leaders. The film presents dancing, a universal and uniquely human activity often representing joy, with eerie footage of Saddam and his sons’ torture tools while they dance.

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.

This is a cinematic letter to the title character, who left Tunisia and now lives in Belgium. Shot in the first year after the Tunisian revolution, this is a poetic journey through a troubled landscape. Between order and chaos, the film reveals a land of disillusionment but also of humour and hope.

Zinal, a small town in the Swiss Alps, looks straight up toward the melting glaciers of the Couronne Impériale. The townspeople struggle with nihilistic indifference. When the threat is so immediate, and their powerlessness so great, can their response be anything other than cynicism? Then a paraglider falls mysteriously from the sky, and Zinal starts to change.