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“Time was the most important material”

A Conversation with Pablo Guarise and Guillaume Maupin

Conversation
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On April 10, 2026, the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem presented the New York City premiere of The Magic City: Birmingham According to Sun Ra (2025), the first feature co-directed by French-born, Brussels-based filmmakers Guillaume Maupin and Pablo Guarise. The film, an inventive portrait of jazz pianist/composer/bandleader/cult-icon Sun Ra, focuses on his first three decades in segregated Birmingham, Alabama. The screening was followed by a discussion with the filmmakers and programmer Andrew Castillo.

The World Begins Its Turn

On Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen

Article
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The red-hot sun, enormous, rising on the distant horizon. A stillness before everything else. Yeelen – brightness, light – opens not with a character or a crisis but with the world itself. This is the first and most decisive of Souleymane Cissé’s refusals: to begin where narrative cinema usually insists one must. Instead, we are made to wait, to look, to be reminded that the cosmos predates the story, and that the story – any story – simply emerges from it.

Du noir

Article
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Met de kortfilm Dans le noir du temps (2002) componeert Jean-Luc Godard een eschatologisch filmessay, “un film sur la fin de tout”. Verspreid over elf segmenten schikt en herschikt hij filmbeelden volgens nieuwe gedachtebewegingen die samen het einde evoceren van “alles” wat de mensheid heeft voortgebracht. Godard recycleert daarbij beelden uit zijn eigen oeuvre (Made in USA, Le petit soldat, Vivre sa vie), uit de filmgeschiedenis en uit anonieme archieven. Toch is de film meer dan een eenvoudige collage. Door beelden te vertragen, te herfilmen, te vervormen en plastisch te bewerken, laat hij ze oplichten in een poëtische compositie.

A World Beyond Control

Article
EN

Perhaps this is the function that computer animation can best assume from film: the creation of a totally administered world, a complete faith in the image. Whatever CGI might lose in its production of likeness and in the spectator’s knowledge of how this image is produced, it gains in this enhanced relation to control. No more rustling of the wind in the trees but merely a simulated wind, what Farocki calls a “new constructivism.”

Adaptation as Dialectics

Radu Jude on Le journal d’une femme de chambre (2026)

Conversation
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After the international premiere of Le journal d’une femme de chambre (2026) at the Cannes Film Festival, Flavia Dima spoke to Radu Jude during a brief break between final rehearsals for his next film about how his films transcend cultural codes and local specificity, his views on adaptation and the usage of ultra-contemporary technologies in cinema, and his growing influence on both Romanian and international cinema. Radu Jude: “Nobody feels under attack because someone takes their violin into the street and is playing, or records themselves singing in the shower and puts it on YouTube. In cinema, by contrast, there is a constant anxiety – perhaps also a fear that cinema is dying. And so any new technology provokes fears, as AI does.”

This Thing Called Language

A Conversation with John Smith

Conversation
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For the past fifty years, John Smith has been making himself at home in the ambiguous realm of image and language. He worked within and parallel to the London Film-makers’ Co-op in his early years, adding to the collective’s structural approach to cinema an equal concern with the construction of narrativity. In all seriousness, he creates a game in every film, deconstructing the givens of words, sound and images, remaking them with humour, even when laughter seems inappropriate. Sabzian spoke to Smith during Courtisane Festival 2026.

Making On the Bowery
UPDATED ON 14.10.2026
A COLLECTION OF 5 texts, 8 film pages,
EN

70 years ago, in 1956, Lionel Rogosin made On the Bowery, a landmark of American cinema and a key work in the revival of American independent filmmaking. The texts gathered here return to this formative period in Rogosin’s career: to his influences, his encounters on the Bowery, his collaborators and his search for a cinematic language. The collection coincides with the retrospective of Rogosin’s films at CINEMATEK, presented in collaboration with Sabzian.

State of Cinema 2021

Projeções. Provisórias. Provisões.

Manifesto

Antes, as imagens estavam no mundo. Hoje, é o mundo que se banha em um oceano de imagens. Nosso mundo real, material e único; tecido e transbordado por imagens reais, imateriais, numeradas (constituídas de números), inumeráveis. Para observar o cinema contemporâneo é preciso inscrevê-lo no contexto desse exponencial aumento quantitativo e qualitativo da potência das imagens, interrogar o papel que ela desempenhou e continua a desempenhar.

“We need to talk about what we know”

A Conversation with Anne-Marie Miéville

Conversation
EN

She could collect rocks and lace. She could be a harpist or a horsewoman. Lots of elegance, of calm blonde hair. Her first feature film, Mon cher sujet, is a film that talks of women without preciousness or complacency, a musical and essential film. Anne-Marie Miéville often answers questions with a hermetic gracious smile, as if everything we need to know about her is in her film. She’s right, of course. Miéville: “I also have a daughter. In the film, you can see her sing a song she has written; she’s twenty-four. And some months ago, when the film was already finished, my daughter in her turn had a little girl... I start from the principle that we need to talk about what we know.”

Ik heb nooit beslist om documentarist te worden…

Article
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Ik heb nooit beslist om documentarist te worden, om me voorgoed binnen een bepaald kader te installeren. Ik heb overigens een hekel aan dat woord: documentarist. Het draagt bij aan de afgrenzing van een genre dat voortdurend is geëvolueerd en waarvan iedereen weet hoe poreus het is, hoe variabel de contouren, welke bijna-bloedband het onderhoudt met het genre dat er altijd tegenover wordt geplaatst: fictie. Beelden zijn immers minder getrouw aan de “werkelijkheid” dan aan de intenties van wie ze produceert.

Vote for CINEMATEK in the Heritage Tombola
NEWS
EN

CINEMATEK has been selected as one of twelve finalists in the Heritage Tombola, a project organised by the National Lottery, Prométhéa, the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage and museumPASSmusées. Their project, “10 Decades of Belgian Cinema,” aims to digitally restore twelve films spanning a century of Belgian film history – from the 1910s to the 2010s, crossing languages, genres and artistic movements.

The Lower Depths: The Cinema of Shohei Imamura
NEWS
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From 22 October to 13 December, the ICA in London presents a major retrospective of Shōhei Imamura, one of post-war Japan’s most distinctive filmmakers. More than 25 years after the UK’s last major Imamura retrospective, the programme brings together new restorations, rarely seen works, contextual screenings and guest introductions, alongside a new monograph on his work.

Tënk celebrates its 10th anniversary in Brussels
NEWS
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On Friday, 16 October, the documentary platform Tënk comes to Cinema Nova to celebrate its 10th anniversary with “Boxing Against the Male Gaze,” a special evening organised in collaboration with En Ville and Cinema Nova.

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