Pebbles Behind Your Back

An artificial summer rules the greenhouse. Workers tend to carnations. In a multitude of splendid colours, they grow towards the sun until they’re ready to fulfill their cut-flower destiny. Carnations is an audiovisual meditation on movements within a carnation nursery close to filmmaker Martijn van de Wiele’s home.

Obtaining official documents is a symbol of coveted freedom and security for migrants. But how do you navigate the administrative labyrinth? This film explores the relationship between identity, race, and European bureaucracy.

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.

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.

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.

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 wistful but witty account of a trip to Beijing by filmmaker Viv Li, a Chinese art student who has been living abroad for ten years. Her stay with her family mercilessly exposes how uprooted she has become by her life abroad.