Brewing many styles
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The Belgian Film Festival was exciting for its sheer novelty
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A modest festival at best, the Belgian Film Festival brought to Bangalore by Cinema Nova — a one-screen theatre space for independent cinema in Brussels — in assocation with Nani Cinematheque and Films For Freedom, was exciting not so much for size, variety or cult status of the featured films as is normally the case, but rather for its sheer novelty. A collection of Belgian and European documentaries and short films, much of the festival would best be termed experimental cinema, where the word linear is nearly anathema.
Held at the Centre for Film and Drama on Miller Road, the festival presented over three days (April 6 to 8) a melange of styles and subjects, flitting from public transport to death to refugees to the challenges of autobiography and just about everything in between. "Topic 11" by Pascal Baes, screened on the first day for instance, looks tangentially at the issues of censorship and imprisonment by using a stop-frame shooting technique called pixilation, which gives this "experiment in the decomposition of movement" a surreal, dream-like quality that resonates on a sub-conscious level even days after the watching the film. Then there was "Untitled" or "Carpe Mortem" by Laurent Govaerts, which takes the viewer into a completely different world, one where nature is reclaiming the world from post-industrial ruin. With a rich, powerful soundscape and a dreamy but captivating visual style, the film creates an incredible sense of an in-between world, lying somewhere between logical, rational wakening and the vacuum of unconsciousness. Also interesting on the first day were "Koro" by Guldem Durmaz, a little girl's visit to her aunt in a political prison in Turkey says volumes with its powerful silences; "Merci" by Christine Bobette, a quaint, romantic take on public transport and one's essential vulnerability to the power of laughter and "Le Grand Vent", a short but strong tale of the burden of a young man's death on his little brother, suffocated by it.
The second day saw two films directed by Benedicte Lienard and another that originated from a film workshop. The latter, D'un Trait, Yassin, is a short three-minute portrait by Anne Closset and Aline Moens, a lovely picture of the here and now for a young boy whose home was destroyed in Palestinian unrest. Among the two films of Lienard, "Une Part du Ciel", follows the parallel lives of two women, a factory worker and a prison inmate, but both confined and submitted to unfair treatment from an unsympathetic bureaucratic machinery. "To Live, I Left... " continues on the theme of marginalisation and frustration by the bureaucracy, as it follows the stories of asylum-seekers in Brussels, acquiring an exciting intimacy as the refugees themselves shoot some of the footage of the film.
The festival came to a close on April 8 with the screening of "Tentatives de se Decrire" by Boris Lehman, a part-fiction-part-documentary that examines the manner in which self-description and the description of others can be carried out through the camera. Admittedly inaccessible in parts, the film as a whole is still a fascinating work, as it works its way slowly but surely through a variety of haunting images and interesting perspectives on representation, of oneself and others.
Preceding the screening of the Lehman film was a discussion featuring the members of Cinema Nova as well as local artistes on the issue of creating and maintaining independent, alternative spaces in a city like ours.
RAKESH MEHAR
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