25.05.22, 20:30, Ashes and Diamonds

Just before the Easter holidays, we would like to present you with another controversial Spanish classic from the oeuvre of Luis Buñuel. After a long period of exile in Mexico, the scandalous director returned to Spain to make Viridiana. Viridiana, played by the famous Mexican actress Silvia Pinal, is an unworldly nun who has to go and live with her uncle. While avoiding his advances, she tries to save the souls of the homeless people living nearby. Buñuel, always an opponent of religious self-righteousness, shows the naivety of the sister in her attempts to save the world through Christian morality.

Viridiana was banned by Franco's dictatorial government and by the powerful Vatican, labelled “blasphemous”. In one of the film's most notorious scenes, a drunken banquet freezes into a scene that cynically depicts Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece The Last Supper as a childish food fight. At its premiere, Viridiana was spat upon by petty bourgeois minds, but precisely for that reason it was also greedily savoured and awarded the Palme d'Or in 1961. Have a blissful Easter!

This film will be introduced by film history teacher Daniël Biltereyst.

Magic potions and spells, something is brewing in the witch's kitchen.

Cinema for the youngest cinema-goers! Parents and children aged 4 and above are welcome to this screening, where we present a varied and original series of films.

In Tokyo in the near future, the threat of a devastating earthquake hangs like a dark cloud over the daily lives of its inhabitants. Two best friends, on the verge of graduating from secondary school, play a prank on their headmaster. What starts innocently enough leads to the installation of an all-seeing surveillance system. Under the pressure of constant surveillance and an increasingly grim political climate, the friends are forced to confront their differences.

After Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus (2023), a film he produced in memory of his father, director Neo Sora makes his fiction debut with this sultry blend of socially critical satire and moving coming-of-age drama. With tender techno beats and observational elegance, he immerses the viewer in a subtly dystopian world that is frighteningly familiar. Torn between conforming or fighting back, the group of friends is forced to question their beliefs, desires and identities.

Welcome to The Stimming Pool, a space where neurodivergence can move freely and your body is gently shaken out of its assumptions. The Neurocultures Collective, brought together by artist and filmmaker Steven Eastwood, places neurodivergent creators not as subjects, but as authors at the centre. In this enchanting docufiction, their conversations and creative processes are interwoven into a quasi-fictional structure in which experience and imagination constantly intersect.

Filmed on clear 16mm by Aftersun (2022) cameraman Gregory Oke, a world unfolds that rubs against neurotypical logic. The viewer is immersed in a disorienting experience that makes it possible to feel what it is like to move in an environment that is not designed for you. The film explores how autism shapes creativity and how cinema, like neurodivergent perception, works through heightened sensitivity.

The title refers to “stimming”, the performance of repetitive movements that aid self-regulation. In the film, this is given a physical location: an empty swimming pool where the makers come together to move, dance and unmask themselves. The Stimming Pool thus becomes an invitation to make space for forms of being that too often remain invisible.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with various members of the Neurocultures Collective.

Tara is a young widow who returns to her village after the death of her grandfather. With a mysterious sabre as her only inheritance, she travels across the country with her two children. During this journey, she meets a mysterious knight from the distant past, who turns out to be searching for the sabre. However, his quest is complicated by his growing feelings for Tara. A melancholic ghost story derived from Iranian folklore, Ballad of Tara is above all a story about patriarchal village life, in which Tara, played by Susan Taslimi, leads a freer and more exciting life than the colourless men who surround her.

Beyzai, one of the founders of the Iranian New Wave of the 1960s, is best known for his work after the Iranian Revolution, such as Bashu, the Little Stranger (1989). Yet his little-seen work from before 1979 is actually even more remarkable for its outspoken feminism and daring aesthetics, with the anachronistic love story of Ballad of Tara as the finest example.

The film will be introduced by translator-interpreter and film curator Mahdieh Fahimi.

Some loves do not disappear. They hide. Under a bed, for example, where they breathe softly between dust and memory. In this colourful collage film, Olivia gives flowers to the spirit of an old lover in exchange for comforting rain clouds.

Other stories swirl around her. Barbara invents fantastic lies to make rejection bearable. Mauricio literally sinks into guilt. Ramón falls in love with a talking houseplant that looks suspiciously like Olivia. The film skilfully plays with the so-called Rashomon effect: one event has multiple versions, all of which are contradictory and yet equally credible. In this way, the film circles around itself and shifts perspective as if the characters' feelings themselves were speaking.

The images also refuse to remain still. This experimental debut by Tomás Pichardo Espaillant interweaves stop-motion animation, graphic sketches and claymation into a single whole. Various animators contributed to the film, visualising the collision, merging and disappearance of memories. The end result is a dreamlike collage about longing, loss and the stubborn beauty of lost love.

Once again, we are joining forces with cult film festival Offscreen for a film screening that will leave no stone unturned. This time, we accompany them to the altar of Spanish exploitation cinema with La Novia Ensangrentada, a silken nightmare that sinks its teeth into the patriarchal Spain of the 1970s. Susan has just got married and is already deeply unhappy. Strange visions put a damper on her honeymoon, while her husband displays increasingly strange behaviour. When they encounter a mysterious lady on the beach one day, their relationship becomes even more complex. The woman in question turns out to be a vampire who wants to recruit Susan into her order of eternally living lovers. It doesn't take long before the honeymoon turns bloody.

Partly seventies schlock, partly social criticism, The Blood Spattered Bride remains a scandalous film that packs a punch. Made during the rigor mortis of the Franco regime, the film drives a stake through the fascist ideals and normative gender relations of its time. As is customary in vampire mythology, the monstrous here is not merely a threat, but also the promise of transgressive liberation. More conventional monsters are thus shunned in order to explore the horror of the institution of marriage.

This screening will be preceded by the short film The Masque of the Red Death (2024) by Rune Callewaert.

Director Adela Sequeyro wrote this bold melodrama and also plays the role of Ana María, who flees her oppressive hacienda for a bohemian life full of romance and intrigue. With wit, style and daring, she reclaims her freedom. La Mujer de Nadie was and remains a groundbreaking story about female autonomy on the silver screen. Set against the backdrop of the 1930s, a period in which the Mexican film industry was still defining itself, Sequeyro's film positioned women not as moral symbols, but as active subjects.

This melodrama is the first sound film directed by a woman in Mexico. Through expressive close-ups, minimal dialogue and camera angles that were provocative at the time, Sequeyro explores a specific female erotic universe in which, as the title proudly declares, a woman can belong to no one. A radical statement in a culture where women always belonged to someone, whether as a mother, daughter, wife or sex worker.

This film will be introduced by Camilla Baier (Invisible Women) and Bart Versteirt (Cinea).

World-famous Portuguese footballer Diamantino is a genius on the pitch, but off it he lacks almost any form of intelligence. What he does have in abundance is empathy. After rescuing a boatload of refugees with his yacht, their tragedy affects him so deeply that he misses the winning shot in the World Cup final. What follows is a feverish odyssey through neo-fascism, the refugee crisis, genetic manipulation and an absurd search for the source of genius. As a solution to his devastating loss, Diamantino adopts a Mozambican teenage boy who turns out to be an adult lesbian woman, undercover for the government. Meanwhile, his evil twin sisters forge financial conspiracies, a deranged scientist tries to clone him, and giant puppies thunder through the story.

Directors Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt rightly speak of an anarchy of references ranging from Guy Maddin's lo-fi surrealism to Jeff Koons' sugar-sweet indecency. Bubbling with the madness of the modern world, the film suggests a way out that (surprise!) has something to do with choosing love over apathy or exploitation.

This screening will be preceded by the short film ça ne marche pas (2013) by Simon Lynen and introduced by film expert and cinema referee Dario Rens.

KASKcinema and Made in China film festival delve into film history with this long-lost visual poem by Hong Kong's first female filmmaker. Based on a 17th-century Chinese folk tale, The Arch follows the fortunes of the young widow Madam Tung and her daughter, Wei Ling. In honour of her virtue and sense of honour, Tung is rewarded with the construction of a gate in her family's name. However, while awaiting this gift, the stability of her respectable life begins to crumble when, contrary to social conventions, she falls in love with a handsome soldier. Although the storm of her desire proves uncontrollable, Tung decides to keep her love secret for fear of the community's judgement.

Filmmaker Tang Shu Shuen is known as a bridge builder between Hong Kong cinema and the European arthouse tradition. With her focus on female subjectivity and desire, she also broke with the taboos of her time. The Arch is undeniably her masterpiece. Through sensitive editing, playful sound design and nature-allegorical touches, Shuen poetically expresses the inner life of her main character. The experimental cinematography of Satyajit Ray cameraman Subrata Mitra seals the whole in sober beauty.

This screening will be introduced by writer Ans Van Gasse.