Iris Films Dacapo

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.

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.

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.

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.