CBA

From Belgium, Jialai Wang maintains contact via smartphone and camera with her mother and grandmother in China. When her grandmother’s health deteriorates, Jialai returns to Shanghai, but when she arrives, her grandmother has already died, and she is left alone with her mother. A devout Buddhist, her mother seems to pay more attention to her daily prayers, Maoist past and dog Dongdong than she does to her daughter. She herself had been abandoned as a child by her own mother, when she divorced Jialai’s grandfather and moved to the city.

This film is the result of more than two years of work tracking down archive material and witnesses close to Mobutu in Africa, Europe and the U.S. More than 950 hours of footage have been seen by the world. Among the 104 hours selected as the basis for this film, are 30 hours of archives recently discovered in Kinshasa and never before released. Completing these exceptional documents, are more than 50 hours of interviews with those close to the former president and the events surrounding his reign, conducted by the director in Kinshasa, Brussels, Paris and Washington. Like a vast historical puzzle, this film pieces together the tragic history of a country, and its self-styled leader - the dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, "King of Zaïre".

Brussels, La Monnaie Opera House. Three people near the end of their lives meet with choreographers, actors and musicians. They take part in a unique experience which involves music, dance and silence. Their journey becomes a tribute to the fragility of the human condition, between reality and representation, tragedy of the body and freedom of the spirit. Together they question their own relationship with death.

As a letter to her son, the filmmaker testifies her experience as a photographer aboard the Aquarius, a ship that rescued 29,523 people in the Mediterranean between 2016 and 2018.

"The iconographic journey: the martyrdom of San Sebastian" takes the form of a personal travel notebook. A travel through Europe in search of thirty pictures of this martyrdom. The film is conceived as a voyage of initiation, an imaginary reportage...

Over many years, the director’s father filmed his family life almost obsessively. His daughter’s birth, his son’s first steps, and always Valérie, the young mother. An impressive fund of material which their now grown-up daughter Faustine appropriates to tell quite a different story: that of a woman who sees her role as a mother and its demands take away her freedom step by step.

A diffraction of the autobiography using family footage filmed between the 1940s and today, this "science fiction documentary" creates multiple "I"s and transcends a story of mourning

Events of strange and serious nature mark the invention and the manufacture of the nylon stockings. For example inhuman exploitation of workers in artificial silk factories. The US army was a substantial promoter of the nylons.

Lettre d’un cinéaste à sa fille is a playful, free and personal film in the form of a letter, a film interwoven with a thousand stories knit together with different textures, a book of images where a filmmaker shows the images and the stories he wants to share.

"On the Tip of the Heart" - is a documentary on the St Peter's Hospital in Brussels, structured around seven doors from the maternity to the morgue. This is an opportunity for the director to ask the audience a question, namely: what is there in common between a medieval city, human life and a hospital?

Le Cercle des noyés is the name given in Mauritania to black political prisoners imprisoned from 1987 in the old colonial fortress of Oualata. This film touches on the fragile process of unveiling memories by one of these former prisoners who remembers his story and that of his companions. In a visual echo, the places of their confinement come one after another denuded from any traces of that past.

In Ulan Bator, Mongolia, the cur Baatar is shot by a hunter hired by the authorities to get rid off the dogs in the city...

Documentary depicting the filmmakers' efforts to find a nomadic Mauritanian family they had filmed six years earlier in order to show them the recorded footage.

The daily work of Fabienne Roelants and Christine Watremez, two Brussels anesthesiologists who are among the most renowned specialists in surgical hypnosis.

A film made of objects, faces and texts; of lost cats, of found pictures, cut-outs, recreations; a poetic subversion in diary form, one that breaks the calendar into a novel, driving relentlessly as a journey to the end of the world.

At the beginning of winter, a filmmaker retires for six months to a hermit's cabin in the middle of the forest, cut off from the world and its means of communication. Through the words of four women she has filmed previously, all of whom have dedicated their lives to different forms of spirituality, she embarks on a mysterious inner adventure, on the edge of solitude and nature. A journey that invites us to connect with the world in a different way.

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?