Julie Freres

A Life Like Any Other

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.

The Tunes

A café in the north of Brussels. Days are punctuated by the songs that the customers sing at all hours, to amuse themselves, to remember or to pass the time. Those songs transform the place little by little, making the film a strange musical.

Crushed

Through a powerful visual metaphor, Camille Vigny gives a first-person account of the domestic violence she suffered. The images and text interact with remarkable precision to convey the devastating impact of the cataclysm. It's a political gesture, brimming with courage, an icy cry that takes your breath away.

Closed boxes open boxes

Galician writer Xavier Queipo is getting ready to move back to his homeland after more than 30 years of living in Brussels. He empties his house and puts his memories in boxes the removal company loads onto their truck to take them to Spain. Another Galician man, the filmmaker Hugo Amoedo, who is based in Brussels, too, wonders whether and when he’ll be back in his homeland. In the meantime, he teaches his son to ride a bike, wonders, dreams, struggles to unravel ideas for films, and argues with the clerks of the Brussels post.

La petite prison dans la prairie

Since November 2022, the Brussels prisons of Saint-Gilles, Forest and Berkendael have been moving to the brand-new "prison village" of Haren, on the outskirts of Brussels. An ultra-modern, ultra-secure, semi-private prison. But why build new prisons in the first place?

Pāragate

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.

The hill

A hill in Kyrgyzstan inhabited by men, women, some children. Smoke, birds, a waste dump like a Leviathan. Among them, a traumatized former soldier, a grieving mother, young people deprived of a future, living and facing their destiny.

Porcupine

In an abandoned hospital on the outskirts of Brussels, strangers come and go while ghosts linger. Among the shards of glass, a young streamer performs a live sex show for an online subscriber. Under the same dilapidated roof, an old woman lights a fire and drinks her sorrows away in the room where her husband stayed until he died. A chance encounter between these two lonely beings will unleash a flood of memories and virtual data. But real-life connections are scarce, and mutual consolation seems a distant dream. Porcupines are said to gather on cold winter days to share body heat with their fellows, but ultimately injure each other with their quills. How is it that our slightest attempts at intimacy so often see us retreating once more into solitude?

Wild Women

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.

Trees

One day, the tree is considered mature. In any case, it is exploitable for the industry. So, we mark it and then cut it down. With the chainsaw or the harvester, it depends. And then it becomes biomass, pallets, panels, pellets, crates, paper pulp for printing promotions. But what profit does man get from the pains he takes under the sun?

Call it the burning

One night, nine children from the same Tunisian village attempt the deadly crossing. Like a poem or a prayer, this film welcomes the words of bereaved mothers and gives dignity to their grief.

Elsewhere, Everywhere

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.

A letter to Nikola

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.

The Grocer's Son, the Mayor, the Village and the World

Claire Simon goes to Lussas, in France’s Ardèche, home to a vibrant community of documentarians. She films the creation of Tënk, an online platform for auteur documentaries. The initiative is a labour of love for the passionate and optimistic people behind it, but the process is long and arduous, as cultural projects often are. The filmmaker followed them for months, capturing their doubts and dilemmas: how do you manage everyday conflicts? Be accepted by a rural population that you aren’t part of? By the general public? Reconcile private life and professional calling? Reassure the mayor? Secure funding without making ethical compromises? A fascinating, bittersweet and insightful behind-the-scenes film. (Apolline Caron-Ottavi)

Belgium - 20

What happens when a world that relies on traffic and the logistics that allow it comes to a standstill? What happens when sickness and even death are taken from us?

Chasing the dragon

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.

It's Night Outside

Vanya, Sasha and Denis are in their thirties, they grew up together in Kyiv’s northern suburbs. This winter, their murky past dissolves, leaving them without any bearings. They should probably start building their future… or keep on breathing the blazing freedom of the present.

In Another Life

This film is an African “Boyhood” that gives an insight to the political and historical situation of Burundi throughout the last 24 years through the eyes of six street children that now have become adults.

Demeure

Documentary about what makes a house a home.

Passing Time

Lou Colpé has been filming her grandparents since she was 15. In the process of this intense relationship, she notices some disconcerting signs in her grandmother: Alzheimer’s is slowing her down. A new film begins, a tougher one: the story of a couple that must face a tremendous challenge. Struggling against the tide of oblivion, the task of filmmaking becomes the ultimate act of resistance. Trying to retain the last images of her grandparents, an intimate conversation begins and echoes through the songs that play on the radio, conjuring lost stories and memories.

By the Name of Tania

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.

Kev

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.

Nikolay's Dream

Today, as a skipper for bulgarian tourists, Nikolay recalls the dream he accomplished in 1985 : going around the world by himself. In crossing the iron curtain, he has shown the way to freedom to an entire generation of young Bulgarians.

Une vie contre l'oubli

Portrait of Belgian historian, reporter and documentarian André Dartevelle.

Coups de Foudre

Five women tell their « love story ». Each of them had the wonderful experience of ‘love at first sight’ with a man that will become their downfall. The influence settles slowly but strongly. Eventually it turns to violence, protecting the children and running away. Through five poignant stories, this film shows us the chronology of a love story that ends in a drama.

Announcements

The film Announcements paints the portraits of seven women reflecting on the same theme. Their starting point is the announcement to Hagar, Sarah and Mary as in the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran. Their thoughts spread out and weave a new web, drawing strands from their associations and interpretations of these texts. And by talking about their own history, their personal myths, they work up to subjects such as the birth of image in the Christian world or that of poetry in ancient Greece. Announcements is a film about the movement of thought, the power of words, the secret of the voice, and the seduction of the image.