Samuel works in Brussels as a pharmaceutical delivery man. His gorgeous girlfriend Mireille heads off to New York to intern at a prestigious architecture firm. Shortly after her departure, Sam’s computer is hacked. A series of rather dodgy IT-guys fail to protect his wireless network. The mysterious hacker seems intent on screwing up Samuel’s life and his relationship with Mireille. Paranoia kicks in. Sam starts to suspect his neighbours and gets obsessed with WiFi-rays… Love, paranoia and two lovers separated by an ocean of communication devices.Read More »
Quote: Between 1957 and his death in 1976, Marcel Broodthaers made approximately fifty films. The exact number is difficult to determine: Several no longer exist; some are multipart “programs” assembled from groups of short films (many appropriated from industrial or otherwise “authorless” sources); and others are subtle variations on previous works. A recent exhibition at pioneering curator and collector Thomas Solomon’s new gallery, Solo Projects, paired a 16-mm silent film, Un Voyage en Mer du Nord (A Voyage on the North Sea), 1973-74, with a thirty-eight-page, French-bound book that shares its title and ostensible subject matter: the pairing of a late-nineteenth-century amateur painting of an archetypal European ship and a twentieth-century photograph of a pleasure boat against a modern urban backdrop. The roughly four-minute film is projected on a retractable home-movie screen–a Broodthaers motif–and the book displayed on a simple wooden shelf, lit by a single spotlight.Read More »
Quote: The film opens with a chaotic scene: Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne), dismissed from her station after her employment trial period has elapsed, refuses to leave the factory, and is escorted off the premises by security guards. Shot through a handheld camera, the confusion seems to continue as we follow Rosetta as she crosses a busy intersection, makes her way through the woods, changes into her water-repellent boots that she hides in an exposed concrete pipe, and returns to her rented trailer home that she shares with her alcoholic mother (Anne Yernaux). It is a bleak life, and one that she desperately wants to escape. If she could only find a job. But Rosetta is a resourceful young woman, and remains undeterred by the latest setback. She returns to town with a bagful of repaired clothes to be sold to the local thrift store, and canvasses local merchants for job openings. Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione), a waffle vendor, takes interest in Rosetta, and when the food preparer is fired for absenteeism, he encourages her to apply. However, the job proves temporary as well, as the owner (Olivier Gourmet) is compelled to hire his own son. Without any new prospects, she sacrifices her friendship with Riquet to obtain a job.Read More »
Quote:
Knokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice and Cannes, the posh casino hosts the second ‘World Festival of Film and the Arts’ in 1949, organized in part by the royal cinematheque of Belgium. To celebrate cinema’s 50 year existence, they put together a side program showcasing the medium in all its shapes and forms: surrealist film, absolute film, dadaist films, abstract film,… The side program would soon become a festival in its own right: ‘EXPRMNTL’, dedicated to experimental cinema, and would become a mythical gathering of the avant-garde…Read More »
Synopsis:
The Last Summer (De laatste zomer) is director Joost Wynants’ movie debut. The film is set in 1996 and tells the story of four boys from a village in the West Flemish countryside. Although, at first glance, the four appear to be very different from each other, they are good friends. But then they meet the beautiful Sandrine… Read More »
Frederic is a young man in social rehabilitation. He has just found a night internship, in an isolated hotel in the mountains when, one evening, he sees his boss, Jacques, together with this son, hiding a car in the parking lot. The day after, he learns that one of the clients left the hotel without notice… (IMDB)Read More »
During the holidays three men try to break into the Belgian National Bank from a florist’s shop. During their rain-hampered digging, they discuss trips to sunnier climes, the basic laws of physics and those back at home in Eastern Europe.Read More »
Sokol and Lorna, two Albanian emigrants in Belgium, dream of leaving their dreary jobs to set up a snack bar. They need money, and a permanent resident status. Claudy is a junkie – he needs money to satisfy his addiction. Andrei, the cigarette smuggler, must hold up for a while outside Russia; he has loads of money. Fabio, the Italian taxi driver and aspiring gang boss, elaborates a clever scheme: he will pay Claudy to marry Lorna so that she acquires a Belgian citizenship. Then she is to re-marry Andrei, who will in this way obtain the coveted EU passport – and pay a hefty price to Fabio and Lorna for the service. Like all plans, this one will not survive the contact with reality.Read More »