Le Fresnoy

Island of La Réunion, in the beginning of the 20th century. Five teenagers commit a savage crime. As punishment, a Dutch captain takes them to a supernatural island with luxuriant vegetation and bewitching powers.

In the summer of 1979, gay porn producer Anne sets out to film her most ambitious film yet, but her actors are picked off, one by one, by a mysterious killer.

André Demester secretly and painfully loves Barbe, his childhood friend, accepting from her the little that she gives him. He leaves home to be a soldier in a war in a far off land. Barbarity, camaraderie and fear turn him into a warrior. As the seasons go by, Barbe, alone and wasting away, waits for the soldiers to return. Will Demester’s boundless love for Barbe save him?

Stranded along a sublime river fjord in northern Portugal, an ornithologist is subjected to a series of brutal and erotic Stations-of-the-Cross-style tests.

A therapist at a Berlin university navigates delicate emotional terrain as she provides solace to a grieving student grappling with the suicide of a trans woman on campus.

Wang Xilin, 86, is one of China's most important modern classical composers. During the Cultural Revolution he was the target of severe persecution, enduring beatings, imprisonment and torture. With excerpts from his Symphonies, he revisits for this film some of the horrifying events that still live on in his memory as testimony to an era that saw the dehumanization of the entire Chinese nation.

Gaspard is still very much in love with Leïla. They meet in a crowded bar a month after she left him. The conversation turns awry and Gaspard seeks refuge under the tablecloth, away from prying eyes and closer to his memories.

A young woman wandering around meets a young man going to a casting call for a pornographic film.

In 2004 Wim Vandekeybus shot a 52-minute feature based on his successful performance Blush. Carried by the music of David Eugene Edwards and Woven Hand and with texts by the Flemish author Peter Verhelst, Blush is a dazzling voyage swinging between the heavenly landscapes of Corsica and the slummiest depths of Brussels. It is an exploration of the savage subconscious, of mythical forests, of conflicting instincts, of imagination, where the body has reasons unknown to the mind. In dance sequences of attraction, confrontation and repulsion the performers take on animal metamorphoses…

The Mutability of All Things and the Possibility of Changing Some explores our human adaptability in light of catastrophe by way of seminal literature passages implying a transitory social body.

A group of men and women have been brought together after World War II, when Italy regained its national and territorial unity. They make up a primitive community which seeks to erase not only the distress created by the war but also the hardships of life, and look to protect themselves from violence, misery and fear. Amid the ruins of this post-war period, these men and women build a new rapport between themselves, between sexes, between generations, between social and geographical origins, between political camps.

Short lo-fi film set in Senegal. Mostly focussing on a group of Senegalese youths, discussing their hopes and fears concerning the crossing of the atlantic to get to Europe. Will life be easier there or not?

Akerman spends a brief period on her own in an apartment by the sea in Tel Aviv. She films from the apartment and in her narration she talks about her family, her Jewish identity and her childhood. She wonders whether normal everyday life is possible in this place and whether filming is a realistic option.

Ibn Battuta works as a journalist for an Algerian daily newspaper. While covering community clashes in Southern Algeria, he finds himself incidentally picking up the trail of long forgotten uprisings against the Abbasid Caliphate, back in 8th-9th century Iraq. For the purpose of his investigation he goes to Beirut, a city that used to embody the hopes and struggles of the Arab World...

João Pedro Rodrigues answers the question from the title with an autobiographical short-film.

Mariel wants to play Isabella in Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure”. With the support of Luciana, who is also an actress, she has already rehearsed the part. But during the audition, Mariel realises that Luciana is trying out for the same role.

One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean reflects on the experience of not being able to see the world with depth perception. Made up of micro-events from "satisfying video" that swarm on the internet, the abstract narrative unfolds through an appropriation way by referring to trance and minimal music. It's about a desire for groundless waves, blended with today's inexorable entropy of our information societies.

Two boys run away in order to try to face their feelings. In the hollow of the night, alone, their pains and their fears catch up with them.

A hovering, creeping menace sneaks into thoughts, bodies, and glances. Through strange events, anguish spreads and turns into delusions of persecution. The misshapen green mass moves relentlessly forward in silence, its infinite vines haunting minds and the places it covers. In the wake of conspiracy theories, this plant embodies a strange, even alien evil, supposedly there to invade and contaminate.

The mood is heated. Demonstrations are taking place across France, also in front of the Paris hotel where an Italian named Giorgio is booking the bridal suite for him and his boyfriend Antonio. Hotel manager Diana doesn’t trust them and calls the police to get rid of the odd couple. Italians? Homosexuals? Criminals? In the charged atmosphere of the Hotel Occidental, little is needed for initial suspicions to be aroused.