Less Dead Than the Others

The deeply socially engaged documentary filmmaker Frans Buyens had long dreamed of making the transition to fiction filmmaking. The experimental Ieder van Ons was a first attempt in that direction. In essence, it was an inquiry film shot in a cinéma vérité style about appearance and reality in social commitment. With Ieder van Ons, Buyens wanted to jolt the viewer’s conscience and make them aware of the duty to face the truth and to act accordingly. To achieve this, he combined a fictional plot with documentary scenes. On the one hand, the film contains acted sequences about the awakening conscience of a ruthless political figure; on the other hand, Buyens himself appears before the camera to introduce several actors, their characters, and the situations in which they are about to become involved.

A bitter, miserable man runs a chaotic secondhand store, mistreating both his assistant and his customers. One day, a young brother and sister enter his shop, hoping to sell a cherished golden watch. Their arrival disrupts the owner's stingy routines, plunging the children into a surreal, unpredictable world managed by eccentric adults. Frans Buyens’ mid-length feature is a whimsical, satirical fable exploring the clash between childhood innocence and adult greed.

Following the archival horror of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, this poignant documentary chronicles a study trip organized by the Belgian Auschwitz-Birkenau Association. The film follows 120 young university students and 10 Holocaust survivors as they journey back to Auschwitz and Birkenau. Standing on the historic grounds, the youth confront the devastating past. Through deeply personal dialogues, survivors and students openly debate ethics, institutional racism, and the dangers of dictatorship.

This film deals with the fate of children during the Second World War. The Nazis divided children into two categories: “the good ones,” the Aryan children, and “the bad ones,” the others. In the name of ultranationalism, Nazism, the theory of the Übermensch, and racism, Aryan children were mentally indoctrinated, while the others were imprisoned in camps and physically destroyed. These “others” were mainly children from non-Aryan and supposedly impure races: Jews, Poles, Russians, Yugoslavs, and Roma. For this film, Lydia Chagoll conducted research in World War II documentation centers, museums, and concentration camp archives in several countries, collecting texts, documents, and photographs. The film consists of a montage of photos and footage filmed by the Nazis themselves, accompanied by voice-over commentary based entirely on quotations from Nazi publications, laws, decrees, directives, newspapers, schoolbooks, reports, and political texts.

A compilation film, divided into four separate segments, that explores the life and work of the Flemish expressionist painter Frits Van den Berghe (1883–1939). What makes this inspired art film special is that director Buyens does not use a voice-over or commentary text, a deliberate choice intended to give the viewer the opportunity to discover and interpret the painter’s world on their own. Another striking feature is its stripped-down soundtrack, featuring music by Arsène Souffriau.

The Belgian documentarian Frans Buyens interviewed passers-by in East Berlin and Dresden, factory workers and technical draftswomen at the Warnow shipyard in Stralsund, small business owners in Chemnitz, LPG farmers in the countryside, foreign students at the Gottfried Herder Institute in Leipzig and industrial workers in Magdeburg and Eisenhuettenstadt. "The GDR seen through the eyes of a foreigner" was the original title of the film. A few years after the Wall was built, Buyens documented the approval, disapproval and fears of the interviewees.

A rainy evening in the harbor of Antwerp. A man named Laarmans is on his way home even though he doesn't want to. Three lost Eastern sailors are looking for a woman named Maria Van Dam and ask Laermans to show them the way. He decides to help them find this mysterious woman.

Commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the liberation of the SS camp Breendonk. Students meet resistance fighters who were imprisoned there. Discussions arise about the past, present, and future.

'Waar de vogelstjes hoesten' is a rare, satirical fable presented as a fantasy musical. The film tells the surreal love story of a flower girl and a scarecrow who leave their rural home for the big city. Upon arrival, they quickly become corrupted by industrial capitalism and victims of their own growing greed. Featuring unique choreography by Lydia Chagoll, this experimental production serves as a powerful artistic critique. It explicitly warns against the degradation of the environment and the spiritual pollution of modern human society.

This film deals with the experiences of children in concentration camps. The more so because it discloses, above all, circumstances that have hitherto been almost completely untold, namely the fate of children in the camps under the Japanese occupation during World War II. It's a meeting between two women who, when children, were prisoners in concentration camps. One of them was deported to Auschwitz when she was 13 and remained there for two years; the other was interned in a Japanese camp in Indonesia when she was 11 and stayed there for more than three years. The two women talk, each reliving their experiences through a child's heart and soul.

Self-taught filmmaker Frans Buyens captures in Fighting for Our Rights the monumental Belgian workers’ strike of 1960–61, protesting the Eykens III government’s Unification Law. This collage-style documentary is a heartfelt tribute to the workers and sparked significant controversy in Belgium. While several festivals at home rejected the film, Buyens’ work received acclaim at festivals across Germany, Italy, and beyond. Through precise, dialectical editing combined with music and voice-over, Buyens vividly portrays both the power and the setbacks of the Belgian labor movement.