Tag

Although the armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, for the Belgian people the true end of the War was marked by the return of the Royal Family in the capital of Brussels on 22 November. A military parade by over 6000 Belgian and allied soldiers and a series of ten temporary monuments scattered around the city along the route of the cortege, added luster to the grand tour taken by King Albert I, Queen Elisabeth an

La Libre Belgique et l’héroqiue Gabrielle Petit (La Libre Belgique and the heroic Gabrielle Petit, Armand du Plessy, 1921) is a quintessential example of how Belgian film makers were inspired by the Great War in the early twenties. Their interest lead to a more or less coherent cycle of films, following the scheme of the patriotic war film.

French director Alfred Machin (1877-1929) was sent to Belgium by the French firm Pathé in 1912 to start up a film studio, Belge-Cinéma-Film. Next to his magnum opus, Maudite soit la guerre (1913), he made over twenty short and medium length films. In order to cater for local audiences, he gave his films a certain couleur locale. This is obvious in his short films Saïda a enlevé Manneken Pis (Saïda stole Manneken Pis,

What better place to start a journey … than the exact middle of Belgium, here situated in Ittre. In 1989 the geographical middle was recalculated (taking into account the acquisition of Eupen-Malmédy in 1920) and it is now situated in Nil-Saint-Vincent in Walloon Brabant.  In Brussels by Night, the middle is not the beginning but merely the beginning of the end. After the middle, it all goes down. Certainly if

In the 1980s, the Flemish city film has its heyday. After years of historical dramas and literary adaptations, Flemish cinema reinvents itself. In his debut, director Marc Didden (1949), a Brussels’ ketje himself, chronicles a desperate murderer’s wanderings through the desolate Brussels’ night. In the same year – but in a far less dark melancholic atmosphere, Antwerp director Patrick Le Bon m

C’est arrivé près de chez vous (‘It happened in your neighbourhood’ / Man Bites Dog, 1992) is an Belgian cult film by Remy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde with a keen interest in serial killing, documentary film making and urbanization. A year after Jaco Van Dormael’s Caméra d’or for Toto, le héros (1991), Man bites Dog won the SACD award for best film at the Semaine de la cr

In his semi-autobiographical film, La vie sexuelle des belges 1950-1978, artist, anarchist and film-maker Jan Bucquoy (1945) narrates the story of his (and his parents’) sexual life up until the age of 28. First, as a young boy growing up in Harelbeke (West Flanders) and during family holidays at the seaside, later on as a student and sixty-eighter in Brussels.