Le Fresnoy

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?

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.

This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for export. The workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, chiefly from the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu.

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.

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 popular sensation in medieval Europe, bestiaries were catalogs of beasts featuring exotic animal illustrations, zoological wisdom, and ancient legends. The documentary unfolds like a filmic picture book where both humans and animals are on display. As we observe them, they also observe us and one another, invoking the Hindu idea of “darshan”: a mutual beholding that initiates a shift in consciousness.

A home-guard serviceman assigned the task of standing watch over a barren no-man's-land begins to experience an existential crisis after years of lonely service.

A journey upstream the Amazon river where Modernist constructions have been abandoned like the memories of an engulfed civilisation of the future. A science-fiction documentary evoking the colonization of nature, former utopias in the Latin America forests and their cohabitation with the present.

In a film, meeting a strange tribe often starts with the plunging view from a building necessary to the journey. The architecture of Jean-Pierre Secq dubbed the noise of the waves washes over us in this way. However, to open it, the construction was massive and still, unfolding the three concrete wings of this equatorial greenhouse in Lille. This essay on the conquest of America assumes its own contradiction, underlined by a montage of texts by colonisers: Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Hans Staden, Jean de Léry, Charles de la Condamine and the use of costumes and masks inspired by Brazilian modernism. The discovery of a new world conducted in slow motion listening to the minutes of an unlikely trial of the invaders. The most restrained of movements, surplus, to make the most of rediscovering the New World. Gilles Grand, FID Marseille catalogue, 2012.

The first films of Patagonia - where I grew up - show a territory that no longer exists, as the araucarias, millenary trees from the Patagonian forests, were in part replaced by more productive pines. Near my new home, in Belgium, I find araucarias that adorn front gardens. We hear some girls playing in the car, pointing out araucarias on the road. How did these plants become a petty-bourgeois fashion in northern Europe? I confront these archives with contemporary technoscientific images, used by a lab to explore plant modifications. What can these modes of representation tell us about our time?

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.

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

On January 21, 1975, in a village in the north of Portugal, a child writes to his parents who are in Angola to tell them how sad Portugal is. On July 13, 2011, in Milan, an old man remembers his first love. On May 6, 2012, in Paris, a man tells his baby daughter that he will never be a real father. During a wedding ceremony on September 3, 1977 in Leipzig, the bride battles against a Wagner opera that she can’t get out of her head. But where and when have these four poor devils begun searching for redemption?

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.

IVUL is the extraordinary story of Alex (Jacob Auzanneau), a young man who climbs on to the roof of his house and refuses to ever come back down to earth. His actions devastate his beloved family and we watch as their world falls apart. A dark and mysterious gardener (Tchili from This Filthy Earth) keeps watch over the family but is powerless to exorcise the curse that he feels has befallen them. Meanwhile the twin sisters (Manon and Capucine) provide light but sometimes macabre relief. The world of IVUL is a world of both fairytale and nightmare with the family manor house and forest landscape providing a compelling backdrop to the story.

Carrying on Luc Moullets unfinished screenplay about the theft of la pénélope, a camera created by Aaton and capable of recording equally well in 35 mm and digitally, LA ROUGE ET LA NOIRE is a film in kaleidoscope form. The portrait of Aatons founder, Jean-Pierre Beauviala creator, inter alia, of the time-code and the light cameras used by the New Wave (in particular the bush camera specially designed for Jean Rouch) is centered around the basic plot introduced by two women thieves who talk as voice-overs, and whose identities will only be revealed at the end.

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.

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.