Timescapes

Two shy young men start to work in an all-inclusive hotel. A new, absurd world opens up to them. Colourful bikinis, an abundance of food and the management's demands ensure they will never be the same again.

At night, a man stands in the middle of the road. He paints the white markings black. His mind gradually slips back into a faraway realm created by his illness. Some time later, at the mental institution, as he tries to retain a fragile grip on reality, the delusional account of his past begins to unravel. Losing his sense of reality disturbed his life, but at the same time creates an opening for a possible recovery and new hope.

Ever since there’s only one male northern white rhino remaining on earth, armed bodyguards protect him, tourists are standing in line to make a selfie with him, journalists rush to Kenya to tell his story and scientists are determined to find ways to reproduce his species. What is so attractive about the threat of extinction? How does this reflect on us?

Biniam Girmay is a promising young cyclist from Eritrea. He dreams of taking part in the Tour de France one day. Despite all the obstacles in his way, Biniam climbs the world rankings step by step and competes in races in Europe. Will he manage to join a top team for the pinnacle of competitive cycling?

Twelve-year-old Jools dreams of dancing with self-confidence. Together with Yorrith, a choreographer, she learns to shake off the gaze of others and dance freely.

Nobody can escape the dance of life. Prisoners of the Ground is literally and symbolically about surviving in the dark: a portrait of an introvert, melancholic society; a Finnish tango in the shape of a movie.

Obsessed with de/reconstructing our corrupted visions of media, celebrity and appearance, Johan Grimonprez assembled a bewildering gaggle of Hitchcock lookalikes, staggering in girth and exacting in attitude, in a quest to find the most accurate specimen.

The wanderings of a retail trader, Jean-Simon, sketch the contours of a microcosmic informal economy in Congolese society. The financial urgency of everyday life is permeated by the political situation in Congo: a larger, more abstract urgency, which the diaspora experiences from a distance. The film finds itself somewhere in between these two imperatives, between here and somewhere else, the past and the present, small money and big money.

A depiction of the urge for freedom. Through 4 episodes we see 4 family members in a moment when they are tired of being a camel, as a beast of burden. They realise their tasks are meaningless and find themselves in a spiritual desert. The camel wants to become a lion. A spirit that fights against the false values in order to find his own place, his own freedom. Vincent, Renée, Alice and Robin are searching for the strength to undergo this transformation.

Since the large waves of migration in summer 2015, many are ready to house and welcome the less fortunate people of this world. Long before that Doctor Bartolo took responsibility for Omar, an 18-year-old Tunisian who stranded on Lampedusa's coast. Dr Bartolo offers Omar a family, a home and a job as an interpreter in the local detention centre. Around the same time also Adam, a 16-year-old from Ghana, is taken in by a hotelkeeper, who gives him a job as the hotel's valet. Both boys have been lucky. Or haven't they? Because a future is more than a roof above your head. And good intentions don't suffice for true integration. We should at least listen to the boys themselves. Lampedusa: promised land or prison in the Mediterranean Sea? These 2 unique adoption stories reveal the search for freedom and happiness of both the Lampedusiani and the newcomers, and are a metaphor for the task that awaits the European continent.

A series of simple visits of an angelic boy to the inhabitants of a social living block - neighbours that appear anonymous by the multiplication of the apartments. Unexpectedly, every visit transcends a simple conversation. Wandering with ease through the building, the angel reveals the particularities of its residents.

Director Johan Grimonprez casts Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor, unwittingly caught up in a double take on the cold war period. Subverting a meticulous array of TV footage and using 'The Birds' as an essential metaphor, DOUBLE TAKE traces catastrophe culture's relentless assault on the home, from moving images' inception to the present day.

Beneath a reservoir in Romania lies the drowned village of Bözödújfalu, where a community of different faiths lived in peace for centuries. However, due to the village destruction policy of Ceaucescu, the inhabitants were expropriated in 1989 and the village was overrun. 25 years after the evacuation, they meet again on the edge of the lake. The survivors organize a memorial moment, in a vain attempt to pass on the special values of their complex but beautiful society to the next generations.

After two intifadas and the construction of the Israeli wall, the only Palestinian zoo is still there and is now seeking for international recognition and to replace their lost giraffes.

The film uses the oyster and its sensual and lavish associations as a symbol to explore human drives and desires. The oyster takes us on a trip around the world, in which protagonists that all have their own special relationship to the oyster share their ambitions, desires and existential fears. This cinematic documentary explores the intricate nature of our deepest yearnings and quest for self-fulfillment.

A Long Goodbye tells the story of Ida, a 72-year-old pianist living with dementia. In this animated, interactive VR experience, we walk in Ida’s shoes. We experience a day in her life, as her reality is fading.

Poetic documentary portraying Giorgi Shakhsuvarian, an Armenian boxing coach from Tbilisi. Living and working in Belgium, he prepares a young boxer to become a European champion.

Not Waving, But Drowning materialises the experience of Indian refugees during their arrest and detention by the harbour police in Zeebruges, Belgium. Within the tense, haunted context of the harbour and the seaside, and together with them, we slowly lose all sense of time and place. Without investigating their past or their future, the human traffic organisations or the Belgian legislation, the film transgresses into the timelessness in which our society imprisons people without papers. This subtle analysis of human exclusion and the reduction of human beings to the physical body makes us wonder if a human can be illegal at all?

Ginger-haired delivery workers become trapped in an endless cycle of labor and commerce. This surreal allegory explores themes of exploitation, longing, and dehumanization through striking, unsettling imagery.

In this VR film, two little sisters prepare for the Day of the Dead in the mystic mountains of Mexico, remembering the stories their shaman granny used to tell. A portal opens as the Mazatec community celebrates and we enter the interactive universe of their ancestors and the spirits of nature, each keeping a secret world to be unveiled.