Sabzian is an international film magazine, hailing from Belgium.Sabzian est une revue de cinéma internationale, originaire de Belgique.Sabzian is een internationaal filmtijdschrift, afkomstig uit België.
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André Delvaux (1926-2002) is counted among the most important filmmakers in the history of Belgian cinema. Although he started making films relatively late and without a formal education, Delvaux managed to create a rich oeuvre that paved the way for a whole generation of Belgian filmmakers. Delvaux, who according to Luc Dardenne was “the greatest and perhaps the last Belgian filmmaker”, is best known to the general public for the Belgian and international film classic De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen (1966). Admired by filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, his films put Belgian cinema on the map internationally. Aside from his work as a fiction and documentary filmmaker, Delvaux was actively involved in film education. In 1962, he founded the theatre and film school INSAS in Brussels together with Raymond Ravar, where he trained notable Belgian filmmakers such as Boris Lehman, Michel Khleifi, Jean-Jacques Andrien and Jaco Van Dormael among others.
A Reality in Motion
It is rare for an oeuvre of such limited size – two short films, one medium-length film, and one feature, together totalling less than 170 minutes – to have such a great impact and reach within film history. It testifies to the originality, boldness, and artistic freedom with which Jean Vigo (1905–1934) shaped his brief passage through cinema. It is this love for whatever appears before his lens, both people and forms, that makes Vigo’s cinema so unique. “Vigo had such esteem, if you will,” Dita Parlo said in Jacques Rozier’s documentary about Vigo, “a devotion to every human being, to every person, that he tried not to touch them.” It results in a cinema where reality and fiction continually merge in a dynamic of osmosis, where reality is always in motion.
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This Week’s Agenda
This Tuesday, Ghent University film club Film-Plateau screens one of the most elusive yet wondrous films. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zerkalo is an autobiographical film poem in which he implicitly mixes his childhood memories with collective Russian history. As Tarkovsky put it: “The film contains only true events. It’s a confession.” In an associative collage, he interweaves the thoughts and memories of the main character, Aleksei, as a child, an adolescent and an adult with the poetry of Tarkovsky’s father, classical music, and Spanish Civil War and World War II archival material. Alternating between colour and black-and-white, Zerkalo unfolds like a dreamy mosaic in which the past continues to haunt the present. The film encountered such resistance from the Soviet authorities that Tarkovsky toyed with the idea of giving up filmmaking. However, letters from admirers kept him from doing so. In his book Sculpting in Time, he quotes one of these letters: “I am grateful to you for Zerkalo. I’ve had the exact same childhood... How could you know?”
On Saturday, Museum Dr. Guislain welcomes the Belgian filmmaker Boris Lehman for a two-part program centered on the Club Antonin Artaud. Founded in Brussels in 1962 by former psychiatric patients and therapists, the Club emerged as an avant-garde center for social and cultural reintegration. Lehman ran a pioneering film workshop from 1965, and around one hundred films were made over twenty years, spanning documentary, fiction and experimental works. These were not therapeutic films, but explorations in the spirit of art brut. Lehman on Ne pas stagner: “This work does not show a finished thing. It’s an opening.”
From April 22 to 28, four Flemish arthouse cinemas join forces for cineMÁS, a festival of Spanish-language film. On Saturday, BUDA screens Lucrecia Martel’s Nuestra Tierra [Landmarks]. More than a decade in the making, the film appears to mark a shift from her meticulously crafted fiction films to a politically engaged documentary. The film examines the murder of Javier Chocobar and the struggle of the Chuschagasta community, highlighting Argentina’s colonial legacy and social inequalities. On Sabzian, we previously published an interview in which Martel reflects on history and its relation to fiction: “The official history of any country is a myth, and myths are made with fiction. In that sense, I found the language of fiction very useful for untangling the myth of the nation’s foundation.”
Belgian Premieres and Festivals
Each month, Sabzian lists upcoming Belgian premieres, releases and festivals.
In Theatres
Exhibitions
Next Weeks
