‘Le Fresnoy’

Le Fresnoy – National studio for contemporary arts is a high-ranking artistic, audio-visual and digital training establishment which welcomes advanced students for a two-year course. The teaching is mainly based around the creation of life-size works. This educational aspect of the project is supplemented by theory and technical training given in the form of conferences or workshops.
Le Fresnoy is also an arts centre: every year it puts on two major exhibitions, notably in the autumn everything that the young artists and visiting professors-artists have produced, under the generic heading of Panorama, while also hosting a regular programme, which alternates arthouse films, exhibitions, concerts, shows, and an art cinema programme every Friday to Sunday.

PROGRAMME - PART ONE

Archipelagos, Naked Granites - Daphné Hérétakis
(2014, 25', OV sub FR)
Athens 2014. Between devastated desires and lost hope, a personal diary collides with the city walls. The daily life of a country in crisis, the inertia of the revolution; the individual questions which are confronted with politics, survival confronted with ideals.
 
Hasbannium - Thomas Depas
(2018, 15', FR)
Hasbannium is an experimental fiction based on the Hesbaye, an agricultural region of Belgium that is made up of open horizons, devoid of forests or streams. Through these landscapes, a choral film takes shape, with characters evolving as they go in search of a humanity which reinvents itself in a universe of increasingly confused signs and meanings. The result is an impressionist evocation of the temptation to disappear in which absence to self and to the world sketches grainy patterns. 
 
That I’m always falling? - Eduardo Williams
(2012, 15', FR)
Looking for a seed, a young man emerges from the underground where he spends time with his friends. Together they begin a long digestive journey.
 
Una luna de hierro - Francisco Rodriguez
(2017, 28', OV sub FR)
“The ghosts in this film are those of four Chinese workers, who died at sea after throwing themselves off a fishing boat in order to reach Puntas Arenas, a Chilean city on the Strait of Magellan. (…) The inhabitants stand in front of their houses or on the pebble beaches to tell you their side of the story, children learn to read by deciphering words in the newspaper or else they recite and sing apocalyptic fables, speaking of imaginary illnesses that would attack their jaws and dreaming of an ark to welcome them, defying the wind to make their voices heard. History stutters and disintegrates, the earth perspires and corpses emerge.” Charlotte Bayer-Broc
 
Or anything at all except the dark pavement - Théodora Barat
(2011, 5', silent)
A tracking shot in two moments. First a movement forward standing guard in the city. A clearing in the night, with neon lights as a guide. The city, already blurred, is fading. The darkness follows but lights restrict its hold. They redesign contours, express other skylines. Little by little, actions take over, isolated details from films, memories of journeys, in tribute to nocturnal escapades and roadside architecture”. 

PROGRAMME - PART TWO

The Hours Fall - Blanca Camell Gali
(2018, 25', FR)
The young woman is wandering the streets of the city. Her peregrination takes her from bar to bar, from wasteland to the streets, without finding the one she loves. Her desire might not be fulfilled, but the city enables her to forget her solitude. People stop, dance, disturb the filming or get involved. If cinema stops daily life, it also catches up with us, like the young woman, lost in these post-industrial streets, confronted with regulars from a working class Arab Montreuil, at the back of bars you hear Chaabi music in which the oud is barely audible any more. Somewhere, a poet improvises in the street.
 
Last Year When The Train Passed By - Pang-Chuan Huang
(2018, 18', OV sub FR)
What do you think of the small houses you see from the window when you take the train? Who are the people who live in them? How old are they? What do they do for a living? Have you ever imagined going back to these places at random, to meet the inhabitants one year on? This film is a journey from memory. By following the train tracks, we set off on an adventure with strangers that have grown familiar.
 
A GUEST + A HOST = A GHOST - Jorge Jácome
(2015, 15', music)
Mysterious relationships between stones, plants and other living creatures.
 
Isabella Morra - Isabel Pagliai
(2015, 22', FR)
What’s the link between the crazy stories of Adriana, a modern little girl, and the poetry of Isabella, accused by her brothers of treason in the 16th century? Here, Adriana tells the tale, Camille grumbles and Océane tries to get her doll to make her age-old speech. The trace of a programme, or on the contrary, the hope of a possible emancipation?

Part of EXTRA, with the support of the French Institute and the French Embassy in Belgium.