Centre Vidéo de Bruxelles

Marzena Sowa is a quintessential contemporary European: independent, aware of how the world works—or should work—and single. After her mother’s death, she is consumed by longing and sets off for her distant homeland, a Polish village where her beloved aunt Niuszka—an embodiment of joie de vivre and peace with herself—lived her entire life under the heavy weight of patriarchy. The film becomes a collision of social models, resolved with an open ending.

This is the portrait of an industrial city with its collapses, mutations, landscapes and language. A film that features René Magritte, a camp of homeless people, key figures in urban revival, the inventor of the Big Bang, Les Zèbres (Royal Charleroi Sporting Club) , socialism, the mute astonishment of childhood…

Watchman Guangdong and his wife Baoyan have devoted their lives to their only son, Zhaohang. When he leaves China to pursue a music career at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, the couple must confront the emotional void his absence creates. Through phone calls, they try to guide Zhaohang from afar, but his journey is shaped by both his deep desire to please his beloved father and his own personal ambition.

Confronted with an unplanned and often interrupted pregnancy, men from 20 to 40 years talk about their feelings and thoughts about such events. Through these stories, director Coline Grando questions the place of a man in the relationship between women and men.

In 2016, videos showing the slaughter conditions of farm animals shocked the public opinion, who quickly forgot about them. With complicit gaze, Elsa Maury films a young shepherd’s relationship of co-dependence with her flock of ewes, which she must learn to slaughter under the best possible conditions.

6 years of exile, 948 dialyses, 2000 injections, Meruzhan, like his travelling companions, is waiting for a transplant and a right of residence. Between mythical narrative and bureaucratic nonsense, the film traces their struggle for life. To parasitize the real and to save them from desperation, they use symbolic gestures, humor, and they laugh, even of death!

Marc Coton, a working father, lives a busy life.

Four entrepreneurs are searching for a narrative for their newly founded startup. Lacking inspiration, they discover an app that creates virtuous stories of revolution, community, sustainability... but it ultimately confronts them with the reality of current corporate models.

Tired of always being offered the same cliché roles, Tom, a committed Franco-Beninese actor, decides to make his first feature film featuring racialized actors. He calls on a film crew to film the realization process.

In the 1970s, the cleaning ladies of the Catholic University of Louvain fired their boss and created their cleaning cooperative, Le Balai Libéré. 50 years later, the cleaning staff of UCLouvain meets the workers of yesterday: working without a boss, is it still an option?

After a 10 days clandestine journey, a young Iranian couple finds asylum in Belgium. Then comes the hope of starting a new life, facing social constraints and uncertainties.

Unexpectedly, Marion Guillard captures the perfect shot: A flock of birds pirouette in the evening sky, the camera follows their graceful movements as if hypnotized, symbiotically. The road to this moment was long. Guillard shares her journey to the USA with us, which is not only marked by feelings of alienation from her family – the postcard motifs spread before her eyes also leave her cold. In a voiceover, she talks about her relationship to herself and her body, about an ideal of femininity she does not conform to, and disturbing encounters with men.

Goujons 59/63 is a chronicle of life and cohabitation in a social housingblock, in the company of people attached to where they live, social workers that attempt to plug the gaps and of the concierge, a central figure of this world to which he holds all the keys.