Elias Grootaers

Shot in the German countryside, Catskin is a mysterious and alluring portrait of Ludwig, a teenage boy who lives a simple life with his father, grandmother, and their cats.

In the back room of a flower shop, Tomi, Rasto and Mižu are digging a tunnel in order to break into the safe of the National Bank. After heavy rainfall, the underground maze gets submerged by water and they are forced to stop working.

"The One Close to the Sea shows the immersion of a filmmaker in a Scottish landscape. Not a narrative representation of what happens on the surface of this landscape, but the search for a simple rhythm, that lies underneath this landscape and makes up its essence. This is not a search for any landscape, but for that mode of being, that is essential to 'all' landscape. A search for what transforms mere place, into landscape. The rhythm of the land; light, movement, sound. The action of warm colours gives way to a deeper molecular game, that precedes all surface action. Not the violence of lightning, but the silent force of a charged cloud. Not a hymn of praise for nature, but an icy breath that is the direct expression of this nature. Not the chaos of a forest in bloom, but the simplicity of a bare landscape. The camera seeks to move at this level, at this rhythm, a rhythm that is not only the essence of nature, but also the essence of cinema..." (Thijs Klaps, 2023)

Surrounded by the sound of nocturnal animals, a girl falls into a deep sleep. Gradually we are drawn into her dream, which unfolds into a cosmic journey through the meadows of Erpe-Mere.

Twelve-year-old Zlata has to find her way in Belgium after she inevitably had to flee the war in her home country, Ukraine. Her father, Petro, and Findus, her cat, stayed behind, Mother Ira and little brother Martin came along. Step by step the adolescent girl explores not only her new living environment, but also her own identity. Awaiting the uncertain arrival of her father, Zlata slowly opens up.

The wanderings of a retail trader, Jean-Simon, sketch the contours of a microcosmic informal economy in Congolese society. The financial urgency of everyday life is permeated by the political situation in Congo: a larger, more abstract urgency, which the diaspora experiences from a distance. The film finds itself somewhere in between these two imperatives, between here and somewhere else, the past and the present, small money and big money.

Not Waving, But Drowning materialises the experience of Indian refugees during their arrest and detention by the harbour police in Zeebruges, Belgium. Within the tense, haunted context of the harbour and the seaside, and together with them, we slowly lose all sense of time and place. Without investigating their past or their future, the human traffic organisations or the Belgian legislation, the film transgresses into the timelessness in which our society imprisons people without papers. This subtle analysis of human exclusion and the reduction of human beings to the physical body makes us wonder if a human can be illegal at all?

Poetic documentary portraying Giorgi Shakhsuvarian, an Armenian boxing coach from Tbilisi. Living and working in Belgium, he prepares a young boxer to become a European champion.