Abacaris Films

The iconic book ”Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century” by Patrik Ouředník, first published in 2001, thanks to the imagination of the French filmmaker has transformed into an apocalyptic chronicle of the last century. A straightforward testimony of scientific rationality, which led the society to a spiritual crisis and resulted in six genocides, is accompanied with melancholic Mahlerian echoes of La Belle Époque when the world was just getting ready for the century that negated all humanity. The film raises the question whether Europe in post-history and post-humanity, sweetly anaesthetized to collective unconsciousness, will pretend as if nothing had happened.

Despite the fact that there have been many changes over time in the way anorexia is viewed on a societal, cultural and medical level, the condition remains an enigma. For centuries, descriptions and interpretations of the condition - some conflicting, some complementary - have followed on from one another. This illness of mind and body resists any exclusively biological or exclusively psychoanalytical approach. The body, which becomes a battleground, bears the brunt of this relationship and dependency disorder.

This film explains what James Ensor (1860-1949) meant for the development of art and makes palpable where he got his inspiration from.