Week 9/2026

On Wednesday, KASKcinema will screen the rarely shown Traversées (1982), newly restored by CINEMATEK. The film follows two anonymous passengers who’ve been stopped by British and Belgian authorities, leaving them trapped on the ferry between the two borders. Traversées emerged from the personal experience of Tunisian-Belgian director Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud, who was turned back at the British border. There, he encountered a Slavic migrant, inspiring him to make a film about two figures caught between borders. The film explores not only physical but also mental and ideological boundaries, reflecting Ben Mahmoud’s growing awareness of his position as a minority in multicultural Belgium.

Over the past three months, CINEMATEK has presented a complete Fritz Lang retrospective, concluding this Saturday with Die Tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse (1960). Lang revisits the infamous Dr. Mabuse, introduced in earlier films in the 1920s and 1930s; a shape-shifting manipulator and telepathic hypnotist who builds a “society of crime” using possession and technology such as TVs and phonographs. Set in 1960s Germany, Mabuse exploits hypnotized victims and the surveillance system of a bugged hotel to steal nuclear secrets from an American industrialist. Lang’s final film offers a dark meditation on audiovisual voyeurism, structured like a comic strip around the television.

Screening on Sunday at De Cinema, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Orson Welles’s second feature after Citizen Kane, follows the Ambersons, a wealthy American family in decline, and their spoiled, arrogant heir, George Amberson Minafer. Welles could not complete the film as he envisioned; the studio, RKO, took over, re-editing, shortening, and even reshooting scenes. Welles famously said, “It looks as though somebody had run a lawnmower through the celluloid… They destroyed Ambersons and it destroyed me.” Despite these interventions, the film remains a classic of American cinema, showcasing Welles’s inventive approach to filmmaking. As Peter Bogdanovich noted, “It is all the more amazing that so much of Welles’s conception survived the released print.”