An van. Dienderen

For Prism, Belgian filmmaker An van. Dienderen invited Brussels-based Rosine Mbakam from Cameroon and Paris-based Eléonore Yameogo from Burkina Faso to work together on a film in which the differences in their skin color serves as a departure to explore their experiences with the biased limitations of the medium. Photographic media are technologically and ideologically biased, favoring Caucasian skin. Such white-centricity means that the photographic media assume, privilege and construct whiteness.

China girls (or Lili's) serve as models in a technical exercise preceding the actual filming, namely the calibrating of the colors of the camera and printing process based on caucasian skin.

Today this book, A Dog of Flanders is taught in Japanese high schools, it is a classic in the UK and the States and has inspired numerous films and TV series in Japan and the States. The most important of them being the Japanese animated series of 1975 that counted 52 episodes and influenced the Japanese culture intensely. Many of them can still sing the series opening song, … in Dutch! Patrasche, a Dog of Flanders – Made in Japan is a laboratory of the image. It is a prism, through which the viewer can experience how reality is and how a small book leads to a stereotyped perception.