Following over two dozen different people in the almost wordless atmosphere of a dark night in a Brussels town, Akerman examines acceptance and rejection in the realm of romance.
Directors Jean-Henri Roger and Juliet Berto begin this thriller with sequences on the contemporary politics of southern France and the infiltration of organised crime into real estate development there: crime bosses were torching forest tracts to make way for their development schemes in the early...
Mid-August in Paris (the title is a date: August 15) in a sunny, quiet apartment a young woman talks, thinks, reflects about herself, everyday life and little events in a long, uninterrupted monologue. The camera pictures her and her gestures in long, fixed shots moving around the rooms, the space,...
An unfinished Chantal Akerman film about the troubled youths and drug addicts going through rehabilitation in Yonkers. Myra Alfreds, who commissions the film, accompanies Akerman and Mangolte on the film shoot in Yonkers, a city of nearly 200,000 inhabitants in New-York State, just north of the...
Samy Szlingerbaum made his film Dakh-Brisel (Brussels-Transit) in 1980, thirty years after any Yiddish feature film had been produced. Szlingerbaum felt that the only way he could relate the story of his family’s search for refuge after World War II was in Yiddish. This Belgian-based filmmaker,...
Symphonie mixes fiction with reality. The author, Romain Schneid, tells the story of his own claustrophobia in front of the camera when, when he was 12 years old, hiding as a Jew during the German occupation, he could not leave a tiny apartment. He tells and he plays alone all the characters in his...
Insomnies is an impressionistic look at the city at night, avoiding the clichés of commercial or tourist films and suggesting instead a lifestyle rhymed by windshield wipers and the music of The Honeymoon Killers. The film is flashing back-and-forth and ultimately leaves, like an arabesque of...
