Iris Films Dacapo

A rainy evening in the harbor of Antwerp. A man named Laarmans is on his way home even though he doesn't want to. Three lost Eastern sailors are looking for a woman named Maria Van Dam and ask Laermans to show them the way. He decides to help them find this mysterious woman.

Commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the liberation of the SS camp Breendonk. Students meet resistance fighters who were imprisoned there. Discussions arise about the past, present, and future.

'Waar de vogelstjes hoesten' is a rare, satirical fable presented as a fantasy musical. The film tells the surreal love story of a flower girl and a scarecrow who leave their rural home for the big city. Upon arrival, they quickly become corrupted by industrial capitalism and victims of their own growing greed. Featuring unique choreography by Lydia Chagoll, this experimental production serves as a powerful artistic critique. It explicitly warns against the degradation of the environment and the spiritual pollution of modern human society.

The deeply socially engaged documentary filmmaker Frans Buyens had long dreamed of making the transition to fiction filmmaking. The experimental Ieder van Ons was a first attempt in that direction. In essence, it was an inquiry film shot in a cinéma vérité style about appearance and reality in social commitment. With Ieder van Ons, Buyens wanted to jolt the viewer’s conscience and make them aware of the duty to face the truth and to act accordingly. To achieve this, he combined a fictional plot with documentary scenes. On the one hand, the film contains acted sequences about the awakening conscience of a ruthless political figure; on the other hand, Buyens himself appears before the camera to introduce several actors, their characters, and the situations in which they are about to become involved.

The Belgian documentarian Frans Buyens interviewed passers-by in East Berlin and Dresden, factory workers and technical draftswomen at the Warnow shipyard in Stralsund, small business owners in Chemnitz, LPG farmers in the countryside, foreign students at the Gottfried Herder Institute in Leipzig and industrial workers in Magdeburg and Eisenhuettenstadt. "The GDR seen through the eyes of a foreigner" was the original title of the film. A few years after the Wall was built, Buyens documented the approval, disapproval and fears of the interviewees.

A compilation film, divided into four separate segments, that explores the life and work of the Flemish expressionist painter Frits Van den Berghe (1883–1939). What makes this inspired art film special is that director Buyens does not use a voice-over or commentary text, a deliberate choice intended to give the viewer the opportunity to discover and interpret the painter’s world on their own. Another striking feature is its stripped-down soundtrack, featuring music by Arsène Souffriau.

Self-taught filmmaker Frans Buyens captures in Fighting for Our Rights the monumental Belgian workers’ strike of 1960–61, protesting the Eykens III government’s Unification Law. This collage-style documentary is a heartfelt tribute to the workers and sparked significant controversy in Belgium. While several festivals at home rejected the film, Buyens’ work received acclaim at festivals across Germany, Italy, and beyond. Through precise, dialectical editing combined with music and voice-over, Buyens vividly portrays both the power and the setbacks of the Belgian labor movement.

A forty-year-old man loses his work and is unemployed. There is a continual coming and going between uncomfortable in his own skin unemployed person, his mistress - a middle-class - and an exuberant and fragile girl.