21.01.26, 20:30, The Rider (2017)

Animal news from Denmark caused a worldwide #uproar in 2014: Copenhagen Zoo had decided to kill their two-year-old giraffe Marius because he was surplus to their breeding programme. His death forms the starting point for Life and Other Problems, the latest film by Danish filmmaker Max Kestner. From this event unfolds a philosophical and playful quest for the big questions of life: Does consciousness really exist? And do trees know of my existence, as I know of theirs?

With his characteristically idiosyncratic style, Kestner travels around the world, from laboratories to primeval forests, seeking answers from veterinarians, physicists, zoo operators and philanthropic billionaires. Along the way, we discover how everything is connected, from cells to humans, from Earth to the universe. What could have been a sombre essay becomes, in Kestner's hands, a light-hearted, curious adventure full of humour and wonder, somewhere between John Berger and John Wilson.

This screening will be preceded by the short film Talking to Elephants (2025) by Juul Schöpping.

Cowabunga! We conclude our theme month with cinema's most beloved monsters. Flushed down the toilet as pets and drenched in radioactive sludge, baby turtles Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo and Raphael come under the guardianship of Sensei Splinter – a life-size rat who has retrained himself in the sewers to become a master of Eastern martial arts. The four may bear the names of Renaissance artists, but their attitude is that of runaway youths. Skating, pizza-slurping and beatboxing, this septic superhero team scours New York to fight crime. When the mysterious Foot Clan appears on the scene, the Turtles are forced to crawl out of their shells and save the city from the sinister Shredder.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) was the definitive 80s animated series, a colourful cocktail of everything that was considered cool at the time. After much nagging from everyone's mothers, it finally became a feature film. Although many studio executives believed the film was doomed to fail, TMNT became the biggest blockbuster of the early 90s. Animatronics legend Jim Henson designed the robotically controlled turtle suits. Reboot after reboot shows how these reptilian heroes ooze their way into the present, but nothing beats the original. Turtle Power, indeed.

Musicologist and anthropologist Björn Schmelzer is known for his unorthodox approach to polyphonic music, but his thoughts on the subject are just as idiosyncratic. The same image keeps creeping in: the monstrous. Abject identities that do not fit in, but derail and challenge established norms. Schmelzer has recognised this same uncomfortable contrariness for years in the art-critical, philosophical and literary work of Frank Vande Veire.

In Donkere Spiegel, Schmelzer, as a filmmaker, presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of Vande Veire's world of ideas. The film shows a flashily composed space for thought in which fragments from films, literature and philosophy collide with Vande Veire's own words. He talks about the strangeness of language, about man's internal contradictions, about art and literature that stubbornly resist simplification.

The conversations arose at a vulnerable moment, when Vande Veire was seriously ill and everything was forced to take place online. What threatened to crumble, however, took shape as a clear and tentative film essay.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Björn Schmelzer and Frank Vande Veire.

Get ready for a razor-sharp masterpiece that cuts to the bone. Lady Snowblood, based on the manga by Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kamimura, follows Yuki, a young woman born after a gang of criminals murdered her family.

As the snow falls indifferently outside, Yuki's purpose in life takes shape: she must grow up to kill the three remaining perpetrators. Years later, Yuki (appropriately ‘snow’ in Japanese) roams through Meiji-era Japan. Raised without a family, but with deadly training, she hunts down her targets one by one.

The story unfolds fragmentarily, jumping between her violent mission and the events that sealed her fate. What follows is not a straightforward action film, but a stylish, action-driven tragedy. Yuki, played by Meiko Kaji, is iconic as an unyielding, walking snowstorm. The stunning cinematography gives even the most grotesque events a poetic character. All this allows Lady Snowblood to constantly oscillate between bloodshed and reflection, as much a revenge fantasy as a portrait of a life without freedom of choice. No wonder Quentin Tarantino drew inspiration from it for Kill Bill (2003).

Ignore your parents and unleash your inner power, Kinoautomat invites you to relive the magic of Matilda.

Although Roald Dahl's wild and wonderful oeuvre has spawned many magical film adaptations, few inspire the imagination as much as Danny DeVito's playful reworking of everyone's favourite highly gifted troublemaker. Little Matilda's life is filled with a thirst for knowledge and hidden talents. Unfortunately, her parents and those around her are less than enthusiastic about her. Tired of Matilda's wonder at the world, they restrict her love of books, while the dictatorial Miss Trunchbull keeps the class in a stranglehold of fear. However, when Matilda discovers that she has telekinetic talents, she turns the established order upside down. With fiery mischief, she decides to fight the tyranny of the adult world and liberate her school.

You are cordially invited to the birthday party of Kinoautomat's own Ditte Claus. Let's indulge in childhood nostalgia and cut into a very large chocolate cake. Afterwards, the magic of Matilda will splash across the screen in 35mm.

Belgium has six detention centres where migrants are held prior to their deportation. Journalists and activists are systematically denied access to these places, meaning that events within these controversial spaces are shrouded in secrecy. When testimonies of human rights violations do reach the outside world, the ban on images prevents further action from being taken. Can film be a tool for forensically investigating these forms of state violence and demanding justice?

Using three films, we approach cinema as an activist methodology that serves as a corrective to stories that rarely make the news. In From Afar (2025), Gilles Vandaele and Martijn De Meuleneire combine a detached visual language with audio testimonies from inside these centres. The architectural silence here contrasts sharply with the despair that unfolds from within. With À l’usage des Vivants (2018), Pauline Fonsny commemorates the death of Semira Adamu, a Nigerian woman who died in one of these centres. In Et Leur Lettres (2023), Elie Maissin and Mieriën Coppens, together with La Voix des Sans-Papiers, highlight the summonses faced by members of the collective.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers involved, as well as representatives from La Voix des Sans-Papiers and Getting The Voice Out.

Young Constance (Ingrid Bergman), a somewhat perfectionist psychiatrist from Vermont, suddenly falls in love with a mysterious patient with amnesia (Gregory Peck). Her new love turns out to be not entirely without complications when he is accused of murder. To protect him, Constance tries to unravel his repressed traumas in therapy sessions, hoping to uncover the truth in her practice. Because what is love without a thorough psychoanalysis of your partner? All the clues emerge in a delirium where eyes become liquid and the architecture is at least as unreliable as the patient's memory.

Alfred Hitchcock, master of suspense (and notorious control freak himself), brings his familiar ingredients together again in Spellbound. Cutting tension, cameos, plot twists and tight editing. He gave carte blanche to the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí for the set design of the dream sequence. This iconic scene has become permanently embedded in the collective film memory as a textbook example of how cinema can make you dream.

This screening will be introduced by Film-Plateau coordinator and filmmaker Julie Daems.

In this eccentric musical film, Berlin is a stage and getting lost is an art of living. For his eccentric document of the times, Rosa von Praunheim invited a handful of glorious misfits to his home, the Stardust guesthouse, where he had them sing, seduce and stumble. This colourful community of trans performers, singers, dancers and outsiders play all kinds of roles, but above all themselves. Anything goes, nothing needs to be smoothed over.

The film feels like a night that goes on just a little too long. A revue without wings, a glitter show that undermines any idea of “role”. Cinema with a healthy disregard for good taste. Kitsch flirts with sincerity, camp with melancholy.

Von Praunheim, who passed away last December, was a key voice in German gay cinema. With a loving yet brutal gaze, he films people who live without excuses and without a safety net. ‘I am interested in the fragile, the spontaneous, the warm-hearted in them,’ says the filmmaker himself. Stadt der Verlorenen Seelen is now a cult classic and reads today as a legacy for a community that is reinventing itself on the margins, and shining there.

With titles such as The Quiet Girl (2022) and Small Things Like These (2024), it is clear that Irish cinema is flourishing. However, amid the arthouse capital of hit films, the undercurrent of smaller genre films is often forgotten. Fréwaka shows that Irish horror cinema is also alive and kicking. After enduring a personal tragedy, caregiver Shoo decides to leave her pregnant partner alone to take care of an old woman in the countryside. However, as folk horror conventions dictate, there is something not quite right with the local community. On top of her paranoia about her neighbours, the old woman is consumed by superstition about the mythical na sídhe, a supernatural people who are said to have once abducted her.

Delving into Irish history and culture, Fréwaka is a surreal atmospheric piece with both feet firmly on the ground. Slowly, Shoo slips into her patient's delusions and the wounds of the past. Elegant scares are interspersed with a tactful approach to the post-colonial traumas that continue to plague the country. The attention to the Irish language further underlines a commitment to ground the film in a political project that seeks to heal the many horrors of reality through magical stories.

This screening will be preceded by the short film Cold Bathroom (2025) by Eleni Aerts.

Delve into the mind of Federico Fellini. With seven feature films to his name, including La Strada (1954) and La Dolce Vita (1960), and a handful of short films, the Italian filmmaker embarked on what would aptly be called 8½. Otto e mezzo follows the seemingly chaotic stream of consciousness of film director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), whose creative reservoir has run dry. His wife and mistress each pull at one of his arms, while an impatient producer, cunning critics and desperate actresses cheerfully nibble away at his already scarce time. But remember: when reality becomes too stifling, even a crack in a car window can suddenly feel like salvation.

Anselmi (read: Fellini himself) decides to simply make his lack of inspiration his subject matter and thus conjures up an irresistible “film about film” out of thin air. In this wild, typically Fellinian introspection, dream and reality are constantly intertwined, a gamble that was rewarded with two Oscars in 1964 and is considered one of the maestro's best works. Bravo, Federico!

Traversées (Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud, 1983, Belgium-France-Tunisia, 91’).

At 18:00 there will be a screening for students, followed by a second screening for the general public at 20:30, without a lecture. Tickets for the first screening can be found here, while tickets for the 20:30 screening will be available online in January.

All hands on deck, KASKcinema and Studium Generale are shipmates for this special screening of Traversées. On New Year's Eve 1980, Tunisian Youssef takes a ferry trip from Ostend to Dover. However, as he enters the new year in the middle of the English Channel, his visa expires. At the mercy of the administrative inflexibility of nation states, he finds himself in an impossible situation. Without a valid passport, he is refused entry by both British and Belgian border guards and is doomed to remain adrift between the two nations.

This long-lost gem of a film by Tunisian filmmaker Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud is one of the more eccentric treasures of Belgian film history. With Kafkaesque wit and psychological sensitivity, Mahmoud questions the absurdities of national borders. The result is a poetic parable that, 30 years later, also turns out to be a prophetic nightmare. While Youssef plots his escape, the threat of right-wing nationalists looms over the interior and the walls of Fortress Europe are further fortified. Borders seem to slowly multiply to almost metaphysical proportions.

Prior to this screening, film scholar Lennart Soberon will give an introduction on the representation of border landscapes. Although we easily recognise classic border iconography such as checkpoints and fences, modern borderscapes are characterised by their opaque nature. In order to identify state violence, we must also be aware of the administrative, digital and emotional barriers through which power reproduces itself.

• Lennart Soberon is a researcher in film studies (VUB) and artistic coordinator at KASKcinema. As part of the Reel Borders project, he works on the cinematic representation of national borders.
  

This lecture and film screening will take place at KASKcinema. There is ongoing work in the street near KASKcinema, but it is possible to drive up to the entrance at Godshuizenlaan 4. The venue is accessible to wheelchair users and a limited number of spaces are available in the auditorium. The toilet for wheelchair users is located on the first floor and is accessible by lift (90 cm wide, 1 m 35 deep). There is another toilet available further down the corridor past the KASKcafe for those who use a wider wheelchair. A written version of the introduction will be provided. The introduction is in Dutch. The film itself is in several languages and subtitled in English. If you have any further questions about accessibility facilities, please contact the organisation: anais.vanertvelde@hogent.be.