02.02.26, Donkere Spiegel (2025)

Hairy hooves and shiny fins, the show begins.

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

In north-eastern India, on the border with Bhutan, scientist Mansi and her assistant Bicki, members of the local Bugung community, hang a white sheet between the trees every night. Under the bright light, hundreds of moths slowly gather, settling on the diamond pattern of the fabric. They observe, photograph and measure. Nocturnes takes us deep into the lush Himalayan forest, where the beating of butterfly wings sounds like breathing, rain echoes like a soft hum, and research becomes a form of meditation.

Directors Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan avoid explanation or commentary. Their camera watches from a distance, as if it too were conducting field research into the relationship between humans, nature and the desire to understand. Nocturnes opts for a meditative, almost obsessive focus on the research process, seen through the eyes of experienced lepidopterists. This results in an enchanting experience that ensures that the film's message is not understood first, but felt deep inside. A sensory and contemplative nature experience, in which science becomes poetry and every flutter raises questions about global ecology.

This screening will be preceded by the short film Oh, Look! (2024) by Leon Decock.

After tackling costume design and location scouting, among other things, we are eagerly continuing our series on the unsung and unloved branches of the film profession. Under the heading Screencrafts, we give lesser-known craftsmen behind the biggest productions in Belgium their fair share of fame. This time, we give free rein to our interest with a series of animal handlers who explain the secrets of their professions. Maité Thijssen (Castingtails), Wendy Van de Gulderij (Kennel Van de Gulderij) and Dietrich Verzele (Zafara) transform everyday dogs, cats, cows, horses, spiders and other multi-legged talents into true film stars. Here, they bring their professional and personal experiences in the field to a multifaceted overview of one of cinema's forgotten professions.

A lively panel discussion will be followed by a screening of The Rider. Before she was showered with Oscars for Nomadland (2020), Chloé Zhao made this sensitive cowboy film about a rodeo rider who no longer dares to get in the saddle. Zhao based the story on the life of horse trainer Brady Jandreau, who plays the lead role here. With stunningly beautiful cinematography and flesh-and-blood characters, The Rider offers a tender reflection on masculinity, the American psyche and the ambiguities in human-animal relationships. It is also a nice trip to the beginning of Zhao's oeuvre before her latest film, Hamnet (2025), is released in Belgian cinemas.

Although Italian cinema has no shortage of icons, Vittorio de Seta is something of an odd man out. Trained in his anthropological programme, de Seta devoted his life to capturing disappearing folk customs on film. For years, he wandered around the remote corners of Sicily, Sardinia and Calabria to document how farmers, shepherds and fishermen, among others, were changing their lives in the light of post-war modernisation. These observations would lead him to the monumental Banditi a Orgosolo (1961), which launched his career as a filmmaker and screenwriter.

In the 1950s, however, he also made a series of documentary films that distilled his research into stunning visual material. Musician Roos Denayer (Rosa Butsi) brings some of Seta's early films to life with her characteristically sensitive blend of pop, jazz and folk. As lyrical as they are didactic, these short documentaries are poetic odes to the relationship between humans and their environment and the animal world. In The Age of The Swordfish (1955) and Orgosolo's Shepherds (1958), the work rhythm of shepherds and fishermen is examined, while The Golden Parable (1955), A Day in Barbagia (1958) and The Forgotten (1959) exhibit the human body in a spiral of work, rest and pleasure.

With live accompaniment by musician Rosa Butsi featuring Marie Cocriamont.

Cuckoo! KASKcinema spreads its wings during this winter journey through polyphonic short films. Fluttering past different styles and genres, these filmmakers fill our cinema nest with colourful feathers and bright colours. In this way, we pay tribute to animal elusiveness and show that diversity means that every bird sings as it is beaked.

We take flight with Icarus, Come (2024), in which KASK & Conservatorium alumnus Ziya Lemin takes care of a lost bird. In the feather-light Ray’s Birds (2010), Deborah Stratman visits British bird collector Ray Lowden. The Great Silence (2014) adapts a short story by sci-fi master Ted Chiang about communication between humans and parrots. La Perra (2023) uses the crane bird as a metaphor for queer coming of age. Because clay pigeons are overrated, we then give the stage to plasticine penguin Pingu in Pingu’s Parents Have No Time (1993). With Those that Desire (2018), Elena López Riera delves into the macho world of pigeon racing. We conclude with Stan Brakhage's air caresses Birds of Paradise (1999) before taking Anouk de Clercq's Birdsong (2023) as a swan song.

This evening will be led by artist and Denderdier-expert Claire Stragier.

The sun rises slowly over Hamelin while underground a cogwheel begins to turn. What appears to be a lively town quickly turns into a mirror of human greed. The wealthy citizens lock themselves away in their own greed, until the town succumbs to its stench of abundance and attracts a relentless swarm of rats. Then a stranger appears with a flute, hired to drive away the plague, but his melody attracts more than just rodents. When Hamelin breaks its promise, the music turns against its inhabitants.

The Pied Piper is Jirí Barta's visionary retelling of the German legend, inspired by Viktor Dyk's sombre 1911 novella Krysarˇ. In this expressionist animated fairy tale, wood, metal and skin merge into a dark tableau. The rats, filmed in flashes of live action, seem more alive than the humans themselves. In their incomprehensible Germanic dialect, the inhabitants sound like puppets of flesh and guilt. The Pied Piper is a cautionary woodcut about greed, betrayal and the price of human desire.

This film is preceded by the short film Historia Naturae, Suita (1967) by Jan Švankmajer.

All men are trash, date a chimpanzee! In Paris, Margaret and Peter live the kind of neat, glossy life that can only be derailed by something completely outlandish. And that's exactly what happens: Margaret turns out to be in a relationship with a chimpanzee, Max. The couple are said to be madly in love, and Margaret manages to convince Peter to allow her to bring the sensitive but dangerous animal home.

It is almost impossible to tell when director Nagisa Ôshima is being serious, when he is being ironic, when he is trying to make a metaphorical point about evolution, or when he is commenting on the state of contemporary aristocratic European society. In Max, Mon Amour, he serves up madness with a deadly seriousness that allows the absurd to slip into the everyday, and that is precisely where it becomes irresistibly funny.

The sober, unforced manner in which the often excessive events are presented is reminiscent of Luis Buñuel, a friend of the crew. Charlotte Rampling also succeeds in evoking Margaret's burning love for Max with a deadly serious expression. The result is a tightly served chamber piece, in which the impossible is received with porcelain politeness.

This screening will be introduced by filmmaker Nina de Vroome.

When Shula, back in Zambia after a long absence, finds her uncle's lifeless body, she unwittingly sets in motion a machinery of mourning and secrecy. What follows is a feverish drama, in which every action becomes charged with everything that must remain unsaid. While the body is being washed, an unspoken truth swells beneath it all, one that can no longer be kept quiet. Whispers entrench themselves in back rooms while rumours sweep through the walls like a draught.

Director Rungano Nyoni serves up her satire with a dryness that almost echoes rhythmically in a maze of shame, tradition and denial. The titular guinea fowl is a bird that sounds a loud alarm when danger approaches. While the family hides behind convention, the guinea fowl reacts instinctively and without shame.

The result is a sharp, melancholic and unexpectedly humorous portrait of a community that prefers to look away, until the bird breaks its silence.

Lick your fur and get ready for some cuddles, Kinoautomat treats you to a documentary that will make you purr.

Kedi is a furry urban symphony that sings the praises of Istanbul and its many street cats. Sunbathing on the Bosphorus or begging for scraps at local tea houses, these noble creatures live in symbiosis with the fabric of the big city. Is it the people who take care of cats, or perhaps the other way around? Director Ceyda Torun follows both two- and four-legged creatures in their routines and interactions with each other in a refined observational style. Her attention to animal details ensures that the whole transcends a YouTube cat montage and captures certain nuances surrounding the human relationship with (domestic) animals.

Our guest speaker lets the cat out of the bag with an explanation about pets and their human owners. Drawing on her own experience as a filmmaker and her personal relationship with her cat Henry, she attempts to describe the complex relationship between “owner” and animal. Where does human control end and animal autonomy begin in the symbiosis of living together?

This screening will be introduced by filmmaker Marthe Peters.

We kick off our theme month with a cinephile stampede of epic proportions. Red River is one of Old Hollywood auteur Howard Hawks' undisputed masterpieces. John Wayne and Montgomery Clift shine here as a father-son duo of cattle ranchers trying to drive their herd from Texas to Missouri. Travelling through desolate fields and strangely shaped mountain ranges, the men are dependent on each other. Danger lurks at every turn, while the wounds of the American Civil War are visible in the landscape. Hawks based the story on the true expeditions of the Chisholm Trail, but historical specificity takes a back seat here in exchange for a complex character study that dissects the male mythos behind the “Wild West”.

Although Hawks grazed on different genres and registers throughout his rich career, his work is defined by thematic consistency. Here, too, value systems about professionalism and (gender) identity clash in devilishly fast dialogues. The growing alienation between the two men is further underlined by the film's mise-en-scène, which brings hundreds of animals onto the scene in spectacular cow choreographies. The ballet of the beasts in the vast nothingness of the Great American Plains renders our heroes insignificant despite their grand ambitions. Like ants on the face of history.

This screening will be introduced by KASKcinema programmer Lennart Soberon.