Week 3/2024

This week’s agenda features three films that are, each in their own way, profound critiques of the societies in which they are set.

On Tuesday, KASKcinema is showing Éric Rohmer’s L’arbre, le maire et la médiathèque (1993), a satirical exploration of the push-and-pull of societal progress. A socialist mayor strives to build a culture and leisure center in a small French village but finds resistance because there’s a 100-year-old willow tree on the designated field. What ensues is as a study on the delicate balance between nature and human ambition. Rohmer combines two subjects dear to his heart, ecology and urbanism, in the only film he openly conceived as “political”.

Thursday marks the premiere of Sarah Vanagt’s new video installation, De Modellen, at Kanal in Brussels. As a starting point for her new work, Vanagt took walks with twenty young women and men from Molenbeek and Schaerbeek, two Brussels neighborhoods. She engages them in conversation about the place of work in young people’s lives, their expectations, ambitions, and role models, and about personal visions of the future and a society that is changing at lightning speed. The installation will be screened alongside her previous film, De Dragers (2022).

On the same day, De Cinema is screening Agnès Varda’s Le bonheur (1965). Inspired by the Impressionist painters, Varda’s film uses their vibrant colours to challenge our perception of happiness. “The appearance of happiness is also happiness,” Varda herself said on the subject. The film shows, and therein lies its critique, that the image of happiness is already perceived as happiness. As Belgian writer and critic Eric de Kuyper wrote in 1966, “Varda talks about the clichés we live with, and she uses those same clichés to do so.” Le bonheur holds up a mirror to society by making the treacherous world of appearances attributed to ‘real happiness’ all too transparent.