A chronicle of a year of health crisis. A film that travels to the four corners of the planet to question us about our model of society. The grain of sand is Covid. The gear is the system in which we live. The subject: how could a small piece of genetic code stop our system?
From Belgium, Jialai Wang maintains contact via smartphone and camera with her mother and grandmother in China. When her grandmother’s health deteriorates, Jialai returns to Shanghai, but when she arrives, her grandmother has already died, and she is left alone with her mother. A devout Buddhist, her mother seems to pay more attention to her daily prayers, Maoist past and dog Dongdong than she does to her daughter. She herself had been abandoned as a child by her own mother, when she divorced Jialai’s grandfather and moved to the city.
Lettre d’un cinéaste à sa fille is a playful, free and personal film in the form of a letter, a film interwoven with a thousand stories knit together with different textures, a book of images where a filmmaker shows the images and the stories he wants to share.
A computer screen, images from the four corners of the world. We cross borders in one-click while another trip’s story reach us in bits, through text messages, chats, phone conversations, and an immigration office’s questionnaire. It’s the journey of Shahin, a 20-year-old Iranian boy who, fleeing his country alone, lands in Greece, then winds his way to England where he claims asylum.
The Amazon flows lazily through the goldmine-gashed landscape of northern Peru. Using real eyewitness accounts, directors Bénédicte Liénard and Mary Jiménez tell the story of a young woman who winds up in the clutches of forced prostitution when her initially hopeful attempt to escape the constrictions of her village goes wrong. Step by step, she is robbed of her moral and physical integrity. The film reconstitutes a space of dignity and returns voice and identity to a fate formally made nameless. With its powerful imagery, the girl’s traumatic odyssey embodies the destruction of life in a capitalist world in connection with horrific natural devastation.
Events of strange and serious nature mark the invention and the manufacture of the nylon stockings. For example inhuman exploitation of workers in artificial silk factories. The US army was a substantial promoter of the nylons.
At the beginning of winter, a filmmaker retires for six months to a hermit's cabin in the middle of the forest, cut off from the world and its means of communication. Through the words of four women she has filmed previously, all of whom have dedicated their lives to different forms of spirituality, she embarks on a mysterious inner adventure, on the edge of solitude and nature. A journey that invites us to connect with the world in a different way.
How do humans and animals see each other? Dominique Loreau captures astonishing exchanges of “views” between people and animals who coexist in the city, in farms, slaughterhouses, zoos, museums, or in a dance rehearsal room. In The Eyes Of A Beast questions the permeable boundary between man and animal.
A diffraction of the autobiography using family footage filmed between the 1940s and today, this "science fiction documentary" creates multiple "I"s and transcends a story of mourning
Portrait of Belgian historian, reporter and documentarian André Dartevelle.
As a letter to her son, the filmmaker testifies her experience as a photographer aboard the Aquarius, a ship that rescued 29,523 people in the Mediterranean between 2016 and 2018.
This is de facto a film about a film, with the only difference being that the focus is exclusively on the extras. They are filmed while waiting to take their turn, while conversing with others, and thinking about their performances. Although they take their duties very seriously and long to be stars, for the filmmakers, they’re just people that can be coordinated as necessary, nothing more. This film, on the contrary, gives them full consideration, revealing their personalities, what they experience, and what they dream of. The footage comes from many different places where movies are made, involving extras from all different nationalities.
A film made of objects, faces and texts; of lost cats, of found pictures, cut-outs, recreations; a poetic subversion in diary form, one that breaks the calendar into a novel, driving relentlessly as a journey to the end of the world.
In Ulan Bator, Mongolia, the cur Baatar is shot by a hunter hired by the authorities to get rid off the dogs in the city...
Over many years, the director’s father filmed his family life almost obsessively. His daughter’s birth, his son’s first steps, and always Valérie, the young mother. An impressive fund of material which their now grown-up daughter Faustine appropriates to tell quite a different story: that of a woman who sees her role as a mother and its demands take away her freedom step by step.
"On the Tip of the Heart" - is a documentary on the St Peter's Hospital in Brussels, structured around seven doors from the maternity to the morgue. This is an opportunity for the director to ask the audience a question, namely: what is there in common between a medieval city, human life and a hospital?
Unexpected shelter made of prefabs in the heart of a burning city, the supervised drug consumption facility is open every day of the year. Cause some things know neither relief, nor rest, nor death. A place like no other where to come back, again and again, because here, they would make you feel, at last, you’re someone.
This film is the result of more than two years of work tracking down archive material and witnesses close to Mobutu in Africa, Europe and the U.S. More than 950 hours of footage have been seen by the world. Among the 104 hours selected as the basis for this film, are 30 hours of archives recently discovered in Kinshasa and never before released. Completing these exceptional documents, are more than 50 hours of interviews with those close to the former president and the events surrounding his reign, conducted by the director in Kinshasa, Brussels, Paris and Washington. Like a vast historical puzzle, this film pieces together the tragic history of a country, and its self-styled leader - the dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, "King of Zaïre".
Belgian filmmaker Eric Pauwels' meditation on dream, travel and film.
