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 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?
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.
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".
"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?
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.
Portrait of Belgian historian, reporter and documentarian André Dartevelle.
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...
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.
Everyone calls him Kev, this pale-looking redhead, who a social worker found, as a child, locked in a bedroom where he had only rays of sunshine to play with. Now a teenager, Kevin suffers from a form of autism so severe that the majority of so-called specialised institutions have long refused to take him in. Clémence Hébert followed him with her camera, from one place to another. She, who is gifted with speech and he, who lives without, tamed each other as peers with a lens as the only medium of recognition, which captures what palpitates, appears, withers, and recommences. A discontinued but living link.
Belgian filmmaker Eric Pauwels' meditation on dream, travel and film.
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.
Violeta and Vyollca Dukay live in the south of Kosovo, close to the border with Albania. Faced with a very high unemployment in their country since the end of the war, they became deminers. They’ve been going to the minefields every day for six years now. The unique and very strong relationship that exists between the two sisters helps them to overcome their fear and to keep hoping in spite of the precariousness of their situation and the risks they run each day to earn their living.
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.
"The iconographic journey: the martyrdom of San Sebastian" takes the form of a personal travel notebook. A travel through Europe in search of thirty pictures of this martyrdom. The film is conceived as a voyage of initiation, an imaginary reportage...
The simplified black-and-white documentary challenges the viewer to hear the story of the Sahrawi people.
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 first-person documentary about the Canary Islands. Belgian filmmaker Isabelle Dierckx encounters local people and customs while investigating a copy of Luis Buñuel's film L’Âge d’or, which was buried in the volcanic soil by the Surrealists to protect it from destruction by Franco's regime.
