Belgium

The story of a man lost in a labyrinth.

Six months before his death, Kafka wrote “The Burrow”. In this short story, a half-human, half-animal narrator describes the labyrinth he has built for himself to live apart from the world. He multiplies the strategies to protect himself from an invisible enemy who is perhaps only himself. Or death approaching in the darkness of a neighbouring gallery. The film “Axolotl” is a variation on this theme. The main character accepts a job as a janitor in an old building. He discovers a network of galleries that allow him to observe the tenants. But is it really the tenants that he observes in this way?Read More »

Quote:
This film has been more talked about than seen since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972, when it was shown in a hastily shortened English-language version which distributors subsequently hacked down even further. Now the Belgium Cinémathèque Royale have worked with Kümel (best known for the lesbian vampire classic Daughters of Darkness) to produce a definitive ‘director’s cut’, Dutch-language version that runs for almost two hours – longer than has ever been seen before, and giving its labyrinthine story far greater clarity and depth.Read More »

Brussels by Night is a Belgian drama film from 1983, directed by former Humo journalist Marc Didden. The low budget picture was financed partly by Herman Schueremans, organizer of the Flemish rock festival Rock Werchter. The film was named after a 1979 song by Raymond van het Groenewoud, who also wrote the soundtrack for the movie.Read More »

Monsieur Hawarden, accompanied by his beautiful maid Victorine, arrives to stay at a remote farmhouse in the Ardennes. The household retainers gossip about the newcomers and develop rivalries over Victorine which end in her death. Hawarden leaves for Spa and resumes ‘his’ true identity, that of Meriora Gillibrand, daughter of Viennese aristocrats, has a brief affair with an officer, and returns – as Hawarden again – to the French farm… Filmed with a cool, stylish elegance and an eye for period detail, this deliberately slow-paced film unfolds in the manner of a mystery story.Read More »

Three erotic stories from classic writers Marguerite de Navarre, Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne and Guy de Maupassant.Read More »

Plot
Route 181, Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel takes a fresh look at the inhabitants of Palestine-Israel. For two months in the summer of 2002, two film-makers, the Israeli Eyal Sivan and the Palestinian Michel Khleifi, travelled together through Palestine-Israel from north to south, tracing a map of routes they called Route 181, following the imaginary frontier of Resolution 181 adopted by the United Nations on 29 November 1947, which provided for the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. Fifty-five years later Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi give men and women, Israelis and Palestinians, young and old, civilians and military, anonymous people living their everyday lives, a chance to talk about those lives, their experiences, their situation, their particular memory and their personal understanding of what is going on around them. All of them, found by chance in the course of Sivan and Khleifi’s journey, have their own way of looking at the frontiers that separate them from their neighbours: concrete, barbed wire, cynicism, indifference, mistrust, aggression.
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A film crew crisscrosses England trying to unravel the mystery surrounding a record released 30 years earlier, “Spirit of Eden”, that defined the passage from light to shadow of its makers, the band Talk Talk and its lead singer Mark Hollis. From overwhelming obstacles to unpredictable encounters, their journey soon turns into an organic quest. With silence as a horizon line. And punk as a philosophy, thinking that music is accessible to all and that the human spirit is above the technique.Read More »

The approach of the paintings by Paul Delvaux is offered in the form of a discussion between the artist and a psychiatrist who asked about the content of his work. The document gives plenty of room for his paintings that illustrate the themes: the poetic climate, the loneliness of the characters, the naked woman, skeletons …
(google trad)Read More »

At an unusual private school for girls, new students, including young Iris (Zoé Auclair), show up in coffins. The establishment’s teachers, Mademoiselle Eva (Marion Cotillard) and Mademoiselle Edith (Hélène de Fougerolles), introduce Iris and her fellow pupils to the school’s curriculum, which includes fairy-like dances through a nearby forest. When night falls, the older girls, who are on the threshold of womanhood, are then given mysterious, life-changing lessons.

8 wins, 2 nominationsRead More »