17.02.16, 22:30, KNT: Willow Creek (Bobcat Goldthwait, 2013, 80’)

In today’s Istanbul, where the shadow of censorship and oppression is growing ever longer, eight filmmakers have joined forces under the banner of Altyazı Fasikül: Free Cinema. Together, they paint a portrait of a country where critical voices are systematically silenced.

This anthology film brings together six short works, each of which exposes the mechanisms of censorship in its own way. As legal cases against critical artists pile up, self-censorship often proves to be the most effective form of oppression. The short documentaries range from deadly serious to ironic and incisive, linked by a common thread: how do we keep the hope of protest alive in an age where every critical gaze carries risks?

Through Zoom calls, cryptic security footage and dreamlike night-time shots of forbidden places, the filmmakers demonstrate how self-censorship works. They show how ideas and stories, even before they take shape, disappear into a folder labelled ‘forgotten projects’. See Unseen is not only an indictment of repression, but also a testament to the will to continue speaking out and taking action despite everything.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with filmmakers Firat Yücel and Sibil Çekmen.

In a parched village in Gujarat, somewhere in the early 1940s in British colonial India, the landscape is tinged red with dust and ground chillies. Here works the fearless Sonbai, whose refusal to submit sparks a rebellion. When a corrupt tax collector sets his sights on her, Sonbai refuses to be treated as property. Her slap in his face is not only an act of personal defiance, but also the beginning of a collective struggle.

What follows is an escalating power struggle that divides the village. Whilst male village leaders vacillate between fear and opportunism, Sonbai and the other women seek refuge in the factory. Behind its thick walls, they engage in conversations about sex, love and freedom that contrast with the hypocrisy of the men, who place honour and property above all else.

Director Ketan Mehta weaves a gripping village drama with sharp criticism of patriarchal power, caste hierarchy and colonial oppression. Carried by actress Smita Patil, the film unfolds as a passionate parable of resistance in which women, armed with chilli peppers and stubbornness, decide to fight back.

Crawling and burrowing creatures – discover the world beneath your feet.

Cinema for our youngest cinema-goers! Parents and children aged 4 and over are welcome to this screening, where we’ll be showing a varied and original selection of short films.

Join us on a journey through one of the most heart-wrenching adventures in film history: the official account of the gruelling 1924 Everest expedition. John Noel, a 23-year-old mountaineering veteran armed with a camera, filmed George Mallory and Sandy Irvine as they ventured towards the summit. Whilst the two climbers pressed on, Noel remained behind at Camp 3, helplessly following their progress through his telephoto lens. He would, however, prove to be the sole survivor of the mission.

Noel, himself a passionate climber, set new standards for documentary filmmaking with this film. As a 23-year-old veteran, he had secretly come closer to the mountain than any other foreigner, until Tibetan soldiers sent him back. The result is a haunting portrait of human ambition, layered through stages of pain and triumph. The question with which he concludes The Epic of Everest: “If you had lived as they did, and died in the heart of nature, could you wish for a more beautiful grave?”

This screening takes place to mark the publication of the book Schijnwereld: filmkritieken 1919-1935 by Joseph Roth. Editor Steven Jacobs will introduce the film with a short talk on Roth’s film criticism and his views on the film.

With live piano accompaniment by Tom Van der Schueren.

Feel the wind in your hair and the sun on your face; Kinoautomat sweeps you into summer with this visually stunning cinematic dream.

Voci Nel Tempo (Voices Through Time) is one of the unsung masterpieces by Italian filmmaker Franco Piavoli. Virtually devoid of dialogue, the film explores the human condition through a series of actions, glances and landscapes. As the seasons pass in a sleepy Lombard village, life unfolds. Farmers plough the land, young couples chat, and preparations are made for the annual village festival. By focusing on small moments of everyday beauty and struggle, Piavoli succeeds in finding a timeless quality within the village’s microcosm.

Our guest speaker will present an anthology on wordless cinema. Whilst in early cinema characters were silenced by technical limitations, contemporary filmmakers continue to draw on the haunting beauty of silence. Piavoli’s observational films thus build upon a lost visual language to rediscover a form of resignation.

This screening will be introduced by Kleo Van Ostade.

Credits and intertitles are a common yet often overlooked aspect of the film medium. Although typography plays an essential role in shaping a film’s aesthetic and informative elements, this craft is all too easily overlooked. To celebrate the publication of the book Read Frame Type Film: Written on the Screen (2025), we are joining forces with the Centre Pompidou and the Graphic Design Department at KASK & Conservatorium to celebrate the extra-textual aspects of the film title. Using two films, the exhibition explores, through tactile 16mm, how the world of letters engages in dialogue with the visual.

In Michael Snow’s So is This? each shot appears to consist of a white word set against a stark black background. Playing with viewing expectations, the filmmaker constructs, word by word, sentence by sentence, a discourse on the linguistic limits of cinema. Snow’s formalist poetry finds a counterpart in Text II. Here, Marc Adrian weaves typographic structures into a visual arrangement where syllables and their meaning are constantly challenged in formal terms.

Following the screening, we will be in conversation with authors Enrico Camporesi and Philippe Millot (Centre Pompidou) about the publication of their book project.

Film-Plateau transports you to the bustling, hallucinatory Shinjuku of the 1960s, where Toshio Matsumoto ignited the Japanese New Wave with Funeral Parade of Roses. In one of the earliest, most radical queer films from East Asia, Toshio Matsumoto blends documentary, avant-garde montage and playful metafiction into a thrilling portrait of the ‘gay boy’ subculture, where labels such as ‘drag’, ‘gay’ or ‘trans’ were still fluid. With his keen eye for the fringes of society, Matsumoto reveals not only the glamour but also the grim reality behind the glittering facades of Shinjuku’s nightlife.

This loose adaptation of the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex follows Eddie, a gender-nonconforming hostess trying to navigate a city that both celebrates and rejects her. This leads to a psychosexual awakening and numerous romantic rivalries. No exoticising gaze, but an invitation to step inside Eddie’s mind. There we are introduced to her desires, traumas and gender euphoria. With echoes of Derek Jarman, yet entirely unique in its queer rebellion, Funeral Parade of Roses is a poetic sledgehammer blow that still tingles and provokes.

This screening will be introduced by Japan-Square organiser Floor Meesen

Weird Wednesday packs her suitcase for an unparalleled campy crime caper. Forget James Bond and open your heart to Diabolik: a master thief who conquers the underworld in tight latex. Accompanied by his girlfriend Eva Kant and armed with an arsenal of high-tech gadgets, this suave super-criminal plans a series of stunning heists that leave many a law enforcement officer eating their hat. When his eye falls on a substantial hoard of gold, however, our anti-hero faces a challenge that pushes his cunning to the limit.

It comes as no surprise that Danger: Diabolik sprang from the mind of giallo master Mario Bava. Based on Italian comic books and silent-era villains such as Fantomas and Irma Vep, the film is Bava’s ode to the poetry of pulp. Danger: Diabolik strings together a series of stylistic sensations that will make your eyes pop with visual fireworks. Like a pop art explosion, the film blazes with psychedelic visuals and absurdist daring, all set to a roaring pop soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. A devilish treat to round off the season.

This screening is preceded by the short film CHLORINE by Zayd Hamzane.

In the Montréal metro, Raoul and Béatrice’s eyes meet, and suddenly the city seems to shift ever so slightly. He is a rock star activist with grand plans; she is a nocturnal flâneuse who hands out books to the homeless. Every Thursday evening, Béatrice meets up with her friends Constance and Eugène to dream aloud of a poetic uprising. Constance broadcasts politically charged sound art via an independent radio station, and Eugène has been writing a novel for years that never seems to be finished. When Raoul appears in their world, their small circle suddenly begins to resonate with grander revolutionary fantasies.

This hypnotic, fragmentary ode to resistance hovers between essay, fiction and daydream, imbued with the spirit of Godard and Debord. Film, video, archive footage and glitching phone screens intertwine. Playing with the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, between activism and performance, the characters and the city itself slowly begin to awaken from their apathy, ready for a revolution that might spring from books, sound waves and a handful of friends in a dark room.

This screening will be introduced by filmmaker Émilien Dubuc and preceded by the 16mm short film La Plage (1991).

Join us in discovering this enchanting gem from the Japanese underground cinema scene. A former star from the silent film era enlists the help of a private detective and his assistant to track down her kidnapped daughter. Soon, the trio finds itself in a labyrinth of obscure clues and archetypal villains. What follows is a game of cat and mouse in which the boundaries between the harsh underworld of the 1950s and the silent film world of the 1920s blur. Reality and illusion merge in a haze of waking dreams, where magic, metafiction and mystery set the tone.

With no formal film training but a deep reverence for film history, the independent Japanese director Kaizô Hayashi made his debut in 1986 with this utterly unique ode to hard-boiled detective stories, old Tokyo and the mythical past of cinema. It was only years later, thanks to crowdfunding, that this film was rediscovered as a long-forgotten dream. To Sleep So as to Dream feels as though a lost romantic, a kindred spirit of Guy Maddin and Bi Gan, has conjured his vision directly onto celluloid.

This screening will be introduced by Kuleshov dreamer Tim Maerschand.

KASKkrakers is making a comeback. This short film evening brings together students from different generations of the KASK & Conservatorium film programmes – spanning fiction, documentary and animation – to showcase their latest work. In this edition, we explore a variety of alternative masculinities through a four-part series focusing on fragile men. Failed machos, hair-seeking gentlemen and a sleepless boxer are featured in a programme that gently tears open the straitjacket of traditional gender roles.

In No Pussy (2023), Elena Leblon explores the world of men’s retreats. Mao, a middle-aged Chinese man, attempts to come to terms with his inner anger, but soon discovers that the promised liberation has a bittersweet taste. Elsewhere(2023) by Zaur Kourazov is a multi-layered documentary portrait in which a young boxer is followed through his Spartan training regime. Taught to suppress weakness, he becomes increasingly alienated from his own feelings. The search for the true self takes two brothers to Istanbul for a hair transplant in Beautiful Men (2023). With humour and empathy, Nicolas Keppens captures their odyssey through uncertainty. We conclude with Men on Boats (2025) by Dries Marchal. Here, a group of friends confronted with death find themselves in a whirlwind of loss, confusion and ecstasy.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with various filmmakers.

Marcel Hanoun’s feature debut, Une Simple Histoire, follows the wanderings of a single mother and her daughter through Paris. In a desperate search for work and shelter, they move from one hotel to another, until a downward spiral of misfortune eventually leaves them on the streets. In an observational style that combines influences of neorealism with an almost spiritual minimalism shared with his contemporary Robert Bresson, Hanoun offers a melancholic portrait of a world in which individualism and exclusion prevail. Commissioned by television and working on a limited budget, the Tunisian-born filmmaker displays an aesthetic drive for innovation that manifests itself primarily in formal playfulness and the narrative use of sound within a flashback structure.

Although Hanoun’s films and the many texts he wrote garnered praise from filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas and Jean-Luc Godard, he never received the same attention as his contemporaries. His uncompromising stance, not only in making but also in distributing his films, drove him into obscurity. It is only in recent years that Hanoun has been recognised for his aesthetic iconoclasm, which helped pave the way for the French Nouvelle Vague, a movement that would ultimately overshadow him.

Queer March may be over, but the fight for equality continues all year round. In Bandes d’Hystériques, Brussels-based director Kita Bauchet delves into the little-known story of the feminist emancipation movements in 1970s Belgium. Through the radical actions of the Dolle Mina’s in Flanders, the support for the miners’ wives of Marie Mineur in Wallonia, and the groundbreaking International Tribunal for Crimes Against Women (a sort of #MeToo movement forty years ahead of its time), the film sketches a legacy of resistance and tireless creativity.

Unseen archive footage is interwoven with moving testimonies and literary manifestos in a vibrant documentary collage. Whilst the images of street protests, playful actions and historic moments evoke an era of radical change, the film embodies the spirit of a generation that refused to be silenced. Bandes d’Hystériques is more than a chronicle; it is an invitation to rediscover the forgotten stories of these ‘female pirates’ and to find a way forward with the same joy, freedom and unyielding spirit as back then.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Kita Bauchet and activist Chantal De Smet.

Preceded by the short film An Institution Is Not An Island (2025).

“My cherry-pie present to the fans – though one wrapped in barbed wire.” That’s how Lynch described his polarising, surrealist masterpiece *Fire Walk With Me*. This prequel to the series follows Laura Palmer, the seemingly perfect prom queen, as she descends into a spiral of drugs, sexual abuse and supernatural terror during her final, desperate days. On the one hand, a nostalgic return to Twin Peaks; on the other, a relentless, raw plunge into Lynchians horror.

Whereas in the series Laura hovers over the town like a mythical spectre, here she takes centre stage as a broken girl, trapped in a nightmare of abuse, guilt and inescapable violence. Lynch trades the eccentric charms of Twin Peaks for a ruthless confrontation with the dark side of small-town America. The result is one of his most polarising, yet also most human works. Join us in bringing a wonderful Film-Plateau semester to a close with the Master of Dreams.

This screening will be introduced by film scholar Atalya De Cock.

Naar jaarlijkse gewoonte halen we met F*Q voor onze mei vertoning een prachtexemplaar uit de queer, Y2K, romantische comedy collectie naar boven! En net zoals de spionnen in D.E.B.S. (2004) en de voetballers in Bend it like Beckham (2002), hebben ook chirurg Wil en ballerina Vivian in Saving Face hun vaste woonplaats gevonden in de kast. Na een meet-cute op het wekelijkse dans (lees: matchmaking) feest van hun Chinees-Amerikaanse gemeenschap starten Wil en Vivian een hoopvolle romance die al snel op problemen stoot wanneer Hwei-lan, Wils traditionele Chinese moeder, bij haar intrekt. Ah ja, Hwei-lan is ook ongetrouwd en onverwacht zwanger.

In een romantische komedie die genreconventies zowel omarmt als ondermijnt, worden moeder en dochter geconfronteerd met culturele verwachtingen, generatiekloven en geheimen die ze met alle macht bewaken. Alice Wu thematiseert in haar langspeeldebuut ‘the closet’ binnen de specifieke context van een cultuur zonder deze te demoniseren en maakt van Saving Face zo een hartverwarmende ode aan de Chinees-Amerikaanse diaspora en de bevrijdende vreugde van het leven van je eigen waarheid.

There is no better way to bring the season to a close than in a state of collective decay. *Decasia* is experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison’s ode to decay. Over the years, he has collected archive material on the theme of entropy and edited it together into a melancholic visual poem. From travel journals and dance performances to images of natural phenomena, Morrison’s examples of early cinema consistently show humanity in conflict with its own mortality. This spiritual degradation is formally emphasised by the tactility of the film material itself. The film stock of the films we are shown is so battered that it continues to tear apart and burn up as it plays. The result is a film that devours itself before the viewer’s eyes.

Whereas the original featured a soundtrack by Michael Gordon, this Re:Score gives the film a fresh musical treatment. Songwriter Stan Antheunis (Softboy/Thans) takes to his sound machines for a musical journey into the heart of darkness. Using loop stations and eerie sound effects, he creates a melancholic yet warm soundscape that celebrates the film’s transformative beauty. Cheers and see you in September.

This film will be accompanied by live music from Stan Antheunis.