In a double-bill constellation curated by Matti Ullrich, two extraordinary women get to meet who otherwise would have never crossed paths: Dutch actress Sylvia Kristel, best known for portraying Emmanuelle in the erotic film series phenomenon of the 1970s, and the Syrian trans woman Khaled El Kurdi, who’s been a fighter during the 1970s-1980s Lebanese war and a cabaret dancer. They have one thing in common: authenticity. yanco invited filmmakers Manon de Boer and Mohamed Soueid to discuss each other’s films and to reflect on their own work in turn, because of their shared understanding of humans as mosaics of wonder and vulnerability.

Born on the threshold between game and cinema, “machinima”—films made within the world of video games—is a rapidly expanding genre. Dmitry Frolov and Vladimir Nadein have been co-curating machinima for over four years. This time invited by yanco, they bring a new selection of machinima to Antwerp, as part of the Breedbeeld Kortfilmfestival. “Ludic Cartographies” is a beautiful example of machinima’s aesthetic methods and political potential. Spanning essay film, artist moving image, and research videos, it has a formal fluidity and inherently carries a “documentary quality that gazes at the past”.

Curated by Inge Coolsaet for argos, the programme “une place vide dans un paysage” presents archival imagery as a gateway between collective memory and personal experiences. In both Conversation nord-sud, Daney / Sanbar (1991) and National Liberation Football (2020), conversation acts as a mnemonic catalyst. Despite their mutual resonance, both works are laden with absences, gaps and unresolved tensions, particularly in the context of countries whose national histories are scarred by colonial oppression, forced displacement and exile.

The five works in Film Fest Gent’s Barbara Hammer: A Short Film Retrospective, presented in collaboration with yanco and Art Cinema OFFoff, span thirty-five years and together they demonstrate a pattern in Barbara’s work: no disguise. What she felt in her own body and what she showed on screen were often the same sensation, not translated but transmitted. In that transparency, her personal vulnerability can expand outward into something universal that extends beyond the individual body and beyond the screen.

Do you like cat videos? Try watching a thousand in a row, spread them on a timeline, and map out the similarities and differences between them. This experiment could serve as a primer for the work of two-person art collective NEOZOON, whose preoccupation is human-animal relationality. Using only found footage and social media archives, the duo aims to expose the oppressive power structures that position humans as exceptional, and non-human animals as anything but.

Love and respect for an archive cannot mean approaching it so delicately that one refuses to act upon it: every selection, montage, recollection or speculation transforms what it touches. Nor does openness mean withholding commitment. It means committing strongly enough for an encounter to answer back—for an image, voice or vanished life to resist the meaning prepared for it and perhaps alter the form built around it.

Adam Lewis Jacob’s Idrish (ইদ্রিস) (2021) dances between the present and the personal and political history of British-Bangladeshi community activist Muhammad Idrish. His longstanding opposition to deportation campaigns, beginning with his own, helps to understand both the anti-immigrant movement of the late 20th century and the resistance to it, at a time when echoes of these mechanisms resonate once again.

The opening gesture in 20 Handshakes for Peace (2014) by Mahdi Fleifel sets the terms for “Reclaiming Archives”, a programme in which images—official, historical, and digital—no longer function as stable records of the past. Instead, they appear as sites of staging, distortion, and loss. The films approach archives through their gaps and distortions. Found footage is shown as incomplete and shaped by the systems that produced it.

Henry is a Girl Who Likes to Sleep finds the filmmaker once again looking back at herself, this time by orienting her gaze toward her beloved cat, the titular Henry—a chubby white feline with tricoloured splotches on her fur. Throughout the film, Marthe Peters delivers a playful voice-over addressed to Henry, drawing comparisons between their bodies, their unique habits and traits, while also questioning the love and affection she may be burdening her cat with.

As a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image, yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, together with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, critics, and scholars worldwide to participate in a first-ever poll of its kind. Invitees were asked to nominate ten audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. Through this non-academic approach to canon-building, this has led to an inspiring list of 105 titles.

What are we looking to replicate or reflect when we construct a list of the “greatest films of all time”? The canon is encoded in many of our educations and structures many of our discussions about film—whether we are anti-canon or not. So with exercises such as this newest effort, we are telling ourselves what we already know.

Curated by Inge Coolsaet for argos, the short film programme “Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other?” responds to the ever-present police brutality by rejecting futile rhetoric and underlining the urgency and affective power of audio-visual art. This potentially intimidating viewing experience may unsettle viewers’ expectations, but it can also transform the apathetic spectator into an active, reflexive watcher.