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.
A sleeping man dreams of a city at dusk. He is every angelic lover, caught off guard. The film goes in and out of his pulsating erotic dream: heated up, he dreams of landscapes, even of becoming the landscape.
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.
In the dressing room of Cabaret Mademoiselle, Brussels’ hotspot for drag queens, four queer performers are getting ready in front of the mirror. It’s the perfect moment to talk and open up: an intergenerational conversation about coming out and a mother’s love.
In 1998, Semira Adamu, a 20-year-old Nigerian immigrant, died on Belgian soil of suffocation under a police pillow. Twenty years later, two women tell her story in a cry for justice. Through this film, they highlight the reality of detention centres: the harsh conditions of confinement, the suffering of detainees and the abuse by guards and police officers.
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.
1947’s Fireworks is a milestone, as the first American film with a gay narrative. At age seventeen, Anger himself plays the lead character. The film illustrates the awakening of a suppressed desire, a gross fantasy.
A portrait of young skateboarders growing up in a Flemish suburban town. We meet different characters going through their daily routines: riding around on their skateboards, waiting, 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.
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.
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.
In 1962, beloved and controversial poetess Forugh Farrokhzad went to Azerbaijan and made her only short film: a portrait of a leper colony. The House is Black is an empathetic portrait that illuminates a world burdened by tragedy, yet sustained by community.
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.
Elephant is, without question, Alan Clarke’s bleakest film: a compilation of eighteen murders on the streets of Belfast, without explanatory narrative. After each killing, the camera dwells on the bodies, forcing the viewer to confront the brutality of their deaths.
Set in a post-apocalyptic near-future, La Jetée tells the story of an unnamed man whose vivid childhood recollections make him the perfect guinea pig for an experiment in time travel. After a lengthy period of conditioning, he is sent back in time, where he falls in love with a woman whom he once saw on a pier.
Incident by a Bank is based on true facts and stages a surreal, failed bank robbery that the filmmaker himself witnessed in 2006, in central Stockholm. By constantly keeping the viewer at a sterile distance from the main action, Östlund slowly shifts the focus from the robbery to those witnessing the situation from a safe distance.
A man finds himself haunted by a mysterious black tower in London that appears to follow him wherever he goes. The Black Tower isan example of a film that succesfully plays with emotions and the language of film.
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.
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.
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.
Drawing on digital memories and using online tools such as Google Maps, Aulona Fetahaj reflects on how it feels to be the child of refugees in the digital age.
Day and night, a giant sits on a hill, far away from his smaller fellow man. He fills his days organising things and making sure everything is in the right place at the right time.
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.
Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel wrote his first feat together with Salvador Dalí, based on their dreams. Don’t get stuck on the plot. Buñuel deliberately omits chronology and opts for Freudian dream logic, in which scenes do not necessarily follow one another logically.
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.
Confused about German bureaucracy and questioning her sexuality, Hoda, an Iranian asylum seeker in Berlin, finds herself hooked on Magdalena, who promised to ensure her asylum by marrying her. Due to changes in Magdalena’s private life, her decision to marry Hoda becomes more complex.
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.
Scorpio Rising is perhaps Kenneth Anger’s best-known work. Set to the beats of 1960s pop music, the film follows a group of bikers and explores the occult, homosexuality, and Nazism. It also idolises rebellious public figures such as James Dean and Marlon Brando.
Emma De Swaef, Marc James Roels, Belgium, 2011, 17’
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.
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.
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.
During his heyday, Buster Keaton was also known as The Great Stone Face. The American comedian is best known for his silent films, which focus on physical comedy and his deadpan facial expressions.
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.
A young woman, played by Chantal Akerman herself, enters her flat in Brussels and begins a household routine that gradually degenerates. Parodying the everyday, she mops the floor, polishes her shoes, and sticks tape over the cracks in the door, thereby giving domestic life an explosive twist.
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.
In The Seasons, Artavazd Pelechian captures a reclusive farming community in its incessant struggle against the elements of nature. The film shows humanity trapped in a cruel but stunningly beautiful existence.
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.
In Zero for Conduct, four rebellious pupils plan a revolt to take over the school. The film was first shown in Paris in 1933, but shocked so many viewers that it was subsequently banned from screens until the end of World War II.
The dream of an Iran post-Islamic Republic is not only part of the online discourse, but also of the protests on the streets. This is precisely what Iranian visual artist Saleh Kashefi depicts in their award-winning video And How Miserable is the Home of Evil: Iran’s Supreme Leader (finally) falls.
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.
Winter. A fifteen-year-old girl in a remote Georgian town tries to get closer to her older brother just as he decides to leave home in search of work abroad.
In Magic, a portrait of Joris, images sourced from different periods in time are glued together. Worn-out VHS footage filmed by the artist’s father is placed beside 8mm images she filmed herself. Both have the same subject: one boy, both a son and a brother. Connecting images of then and now, a new narrative of remembering opens up.
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. The film’s subtle criticism of the 1960s zeitgeist in the United States earned it an Oscar nomination.
