VRT

In the heart of the Arctic, the Yamal peninsula is the world’s largest gas exploitation zone, a symbol of Russia’s energy hyperpower, which caused the appetite of oil corporations. But the Yamal peninsula is also the ancestral home of the Nenets, who have been pasturing here with their droves for over 200 generations. Every year the nomads undertake a journey of 1500 km. But for how much longer can they survive? Today in Yamal, pastures have given way to gas fields. Growing towns, a railway, an airport, the deep scars on the landscape caused by extraction of gas and oil, and the new nuclear-powered icebreakers, which will create busy shipping lanes in the Arctic, are all changing the local ecosystem. With the industry dramatically modifying the landscape, accelerating the effects of global warming, the Nenets way of life is under threat. The documentary gives a unique insight into a vanishing way of life, enhanced by stunning aerial footage, and rare access to an extraordinary people.

Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (currently Zambia), September 18th, 1961. Swedish Dag Hammarskjöld, UN Secretary-General, mysteriously dies in a plane crash. Decades later, Danish journalist and filmmaker Mads Brügger and Swedish researcher Göran Björkdahl investigate the case looking for a definitive closure.

In this Stephen King-like movie about good versus evil, Lien, Sien and Fien Kriegel, unseparable eleven-year-old triplets, set fire to their school. The sisters get arrested and are put away in an institution. Not a regular reformatory but... a paradise. So much better than home. Until the sisters discover that the doctor who runs the places takes away organs and sells them to the highest bidder. Until they find out they're next on his list...

Nelly and Nadine meet in Ravensbrück concentration camp. They spend the rest of their lives together. Decades later, Nelly’s granddaughter goes in search of clues. A poignant film about a love story and the need for individual and collective remembrance.

Nine-year-old Karo grows up with her parents in an Amsterdam commune in the Seventies. She leads a carefree existence in this utopia-for-adults. Everything is shared in the squat, but not everyone is able to honor these ideals. Karo gets confused because of the internal conflicts that start to divide the group. Karo slowly realizes that nothing can stay the same forever.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of ABBA’s iconic Eurovision victory, a milestone that calls for a celebratory cinematic tribute fitting for the ultimate pop band. ‘ABBA: Against the Odds’ unveils the epic journey of ABBA’s rise to global fame. Starting with the moment they won Eurovision, it tells the story of how they overcame critical backlash, societal attitudes and marital break-up to deliver their ground-breaking music and prove themselves as a live act.

In the Andes, a Belgian doctor and his photojournalist wife become ensnared in a native tribe's struggle with a mining company.

The true story of the rise to power and brutal assassination of the formerly vilified and later redeemed leader of the independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Using newly discovered historical evidence, Haitian-born and later Congo-raised writer and director Raoul Peck renders an emotional and tautly woven account of the mail clerk and beer salesman with a flair for oratory and an uncompromising belief in the capacity of his homeland to build a prosperous nation independent of its former Belgian overlords. Lumumba emerges here as the heroic sacrificial lamb dubiously portrayed by the international media and led to slaughter by commercial and political interests in Belgium, the United States, the international community, and Lumumba's own administration; a true story of political intrigue and murder where political entities, captains of commerce, and the military dovetail in their quest for economic and political hegemony.

Recording of a performance by Ballet de l'Opéra national de Paris of the ballet on Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich, choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

Marius and Kitty have been living in Italy for some time now, where they managed to get their hands on a vineyard in Tuscany. Marius has improved his life, so Hugo leaves in good spirits to drop off his daughter Suus with best friend Chrissie for a long-awaited reunion. But something is wrong with the purchase of the vineyard.

This true, astonishing story describes how King Leopold II of Belgium turned Congo into its private colony between 1885 and 1908. Under his control, Congo became a gulag labor camp of shocking brutality. Leopold posed as the protector of Africans fleeing Arab slave-traders but, in reality, he carved out an empire based on terror to harvest rubber.

The Amazon flows lazily through the goldmine-gashed landscape of northern Peru. Using real eyewitness accounts, directors Bénédicte Liénard and Mary Jiménez tell the story of a young woman who winds up in the clutches of forced prostitution when her initially hopeful attempt to escape the constrictions of her village goes wrong. Step by step, she is robbed of her moral and physical integrity. The film reconstitutes a space of dignity and returns voice and identity to a fate formally made nameless. With its powerful imagery, the girl’s traumatic odyssey embodies the destruction of life in a capitalist world in connection with horrific natural devastation.

Winston Churchill, one of the most revered men of the twentieth century. Adolf Hitler, one of the most hated leaders in contemporary history. Between 1940 and 1945, these two enormously contradictory personalities faced each other in both politics and war. A clash of giants whose story begins in the trenches of the World War I and ends with the debacle of the World War II.

About the discovery of a mass grave with Polish officers in Katyn in Russia in 1943 and the identification of the skull that the Danish doctor Helge Tramsen took home

Every day, the Carlingford ferry takes travelers from Northern Ireland to Ireland, a short sea voyage across an invisible border that invites reflection on the consequences of Brexit.

Chantal Akerman is only 25 when her acclaimed film 'Jeanne Dielman' is released in 1975. It is a bold film, with which she immediately makes a name for herself and will influence many generations of filmmakers. But Akerman is much more than that. In the years that follow, she makes documentaries, comedies, a musical, installations, etc. Until her death in 2015, she will continue to reinvent herself. The documentary features collaborators and admirers talking about her courage, her audacity and her never-ending search. Interviews with: Claire Atherton, Eric de Kuyper, Jan Decorte, Marilyn Watelet, Isabel Stevens, Laura Mulvey, Anke Brouwers, Céline Brouwez, Lukas Dhont.

It has been 20 years since The Island was unleashed on Flanders. After all these years, fans of the series are rewarded with an exclusive reunion special, in which thirteen original cast members and the creators reunite for a unique look back.

In Brussels, Belgium, the Royal Museum of Central Africa is undertaking a radical renovation, both physical and ethical, to show with sincerity, crudeness and open-mindedness the reality of the atrocities perpetrated against the inhabitants of the Belgian colonies in Africa, still haunted and traumatized by the ghost of King Leopold II of Belgium, a racist and genocidal tyrant.