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.
Sabzian is a free online magazine that relies on the work of a group of dedicated volunteers.We could use your support. Please consider a donation!Sabzian est un magazine en ligne gratuit qui dépend du travail d’un groupe de bénévoles dévoués. Votre soutien nous aide beaucoup. Pensez à faire un don !Sabzian is een gratis online magazine dat afhankelijk is van het werk van een groep toegewijde vrijwilligers.We kunnen uw steun goed gebruiken. Overweeg een donatie!
The five films constitute an epic project in which he trails the myriad peculiarities of life in India; first in a fragmented idiom, like collages, and then binding them into a reconstructed whole. Yet, precisely through its incompleteness, it relinquishes any ambition to represent India’s cultural cosmos in its totality, even as it begins to approximate it through its own formal autonomy.
A COLLECTION OF
4 texts, 5 film pages, 1 event, 1 news item, collected by Gerard-Jan Claes
Jean Harlez (1924–2026), once dubbed “the savage of Belgian cinema,” was a self-taught filmmaker working outside professional circles. After assisting Charles Dekeukeleire and later working as a cameraman for Marcel Broodthaers, Harlez decided to build his own 35mm camera. With little financial support, he made a first feature film: Le chantier des gosses (1970). Praised at the time as “the first Belgian neo-realist feature film,” it disappeared from view until Cinema Nova in Brussels restored and rereleased it in 2014, when it finally found a wide audience.
Of the films I have seen in recent years, none have struck and, indeed, fascinated me quite like Dry Leaf – Koberidze’s third feature film that embraces both ample duration and a very artisanal production and lo-fi camera. This wintery correspondence came about when my wish to interview Koberidze at the Viennale could not be fulfilled. This format, beyond simply accommodating physical distance, felt much more open and free, ultimately better suited to discuss not just a film such as Dry Leaf, but also to explore his perspective as an auteur on cinema.
Marcel Hanoun is weinig bekend. Wie vertrouwd is met zijn films grijpt wel eens naar de (apostolische) lof-trompet: “Marcel Hanoun is the most important and the most interesting French filmmaker since Bresson. If you don’t like Hanoun, you are against cinema!”(Jonas Mekas). “Un des deux ou trois réalisateurs français d’aujourd’hui qui sont sûrs de rester!” (Dominique Noguez). Intussen blijft het quasi onmogelijk om de films van deze in 1929 in Tunis geboren cineast te zien.
In 2001, Hanoun published Cinéma cinéaste, notes sur l’image écrite, a collection of short notes on cinema written throughout his life. Guided by the question of what it means to make a film, Hanoun reflects on the filmic image and its relationship to sound, the filmmaker, the viewer, and history. Hanoun: “I know that I know nothing about today’s cinema and that I have everything still to learn about tomorrow’s cinema.”
The present from which I write strikes me as being so doomed to oblivion that, purely from a spirit of contradiction, one must preserve a trace of its obsolescence: it is a time in which Marcel Hanoun’s œuvre lies scattered, his celluloid films partly lost, inaccessible or in a poor state, his video essays rarely screened and seldom talked about.
Tu as choisi de t’exprimer par le son et l’image, tu as choisi un acte essentiellement révolutionnaire et politique, la création cinématographique. Prends garde de n’en être pas détourné par les plus paradoxales et les plus fallacieuses raisons.
Ondanks de verschillen markeren Marty Supreme en The Smashing Machine een gelijkaardige breuk met hun eerdere gezamenlijke werk. In beide soloprojecten worden stijl en onderwerp als twee losse polen artificieel uit elkaar getrokken: bij Josh een kritisch manoeuvre dat geen vorm weet te vinden, bij Benny een verweesde vorm die naar inhoud zoekt.
In 2026 bevindt het Gentse filmlandschap zich op een kantelpunt: de moeilijk afgewende sluiting van Studio Skoop, de renovatie van Sphinx Cinema, de groeiende druk op kleinere initiatieven en een structureel gebrek aan infrastructuur zetten de duurzaamheid van het filmecosysteem onder spanning, ondanks een rijke historische traditie en recente ontwikkelingen zoals plannen rond de voormalige Cinema Rex. Tegen deze achtergrond ging Sabzian in gesprek met vijf stemmen die Gentse filmorganisaties vertegenwoordigen.
Aan het eind vergeet je je ergernis over de lama-hype bij de Europeanen, en de eerbied die je voelt voor de berg wordt eerbied voor de menselijke prestatie en voor dit tijdperk, waarin lama’s in auto’s kunnen rijden en optreden in Berlijn aan de Nollendorfplatz. Wat is dit toch een geweldig tijdperk, met weliswaar een paar schoonheidsfoutjes maar een enorme kracht, die het verre verenigt, de berg naar de profeet en beiden naar de bioscoop laat komen – en het heeft geen zin ons daartegen te verzetten.
Vergeleken met de films van Charles Dekeukeleire of Marcel Mariën is de cinema van Delvaux inderdaad berekend en geconstrueerd. Toch schemert de oorspronkelijke experimentele geest die de Belgische cinema van weleer kenmerkte regelmatig door het rigide kader heen. Ondanks de stroomlijning door structurele subsidies kon de Belgische cinema met moeite concurreren met andere Europese cinema’s, waardoor films maken in België een hachelijke onderneming bleef. Ook Delvaux moest “bricoleren” om zijn films gemaakt te krijgen. Zo verklaarde hij de esthetische keuze voor het magisch realisme als vertelstijl vanuit een financiële noodzaak. Door het werkelijkheidsprincipe deels buiten spel te zetten, laat het magisch realisme immers spontaniteit en improvisatie, of inconsistentie en contradictie, toe.
On the occasion of the Belgian release of Hair, Paper, Water, Sabzian sat down with filmmakers Trương Minh Quý and Nicolas Graux. The film unfolds as a sensorial flow of image, sound and language as we follow miss Cao Thị Hậu, an elderly woman from a rural region in Vietnam, one of the few speakers left of the critically endangered Ruc language. In her old age she dreams of returning to the dark cave where she was born. As she teaches Ruc to her grandson, the words “cave”, “fire”, and “house” figure as initial coordinates, tiny lights in the dark revealing a fragmented portrait of an ever transforming and remade world, of memory and legacy. In the absence of a written form of this disappearing language, the film documents its prosody through intimate observations of daily life in connection to nature.
Belgian filmmaker Jean Harlez passed away on 15 May 2026 at the age of 101. Harlez became best known for Le Chantier des Gosses (1956), widely regarded as the first Belgian neorealist film. Though long overlooked, the film was rediscovered and restored by Cinema Nova, which helped return Harlez’s work to public attention in recent years.
MoMA announces two major film programs this summer: Teo Hernández (May 14–26), the first U.S. monographic presentation of the Mexican-born queer avant-garde filmmaker, comprising 19 films from his Super 8 practice; and Universal Westerns (June 5–July 3), a series tracing the evolution of the Western at Universal.
Until July 11, Établissement d'en face in Brussels opens its doors every Friday and Saturday evening between 19:00 and 22:00 for an eclectic program of short and feature films. Screenings will be announced in their newsletter.
In conjunction with its exhibition Origins of Cinema, which traces the evolution of early projection devices from the magic lantern to the first Pathé Frères projectors and the Lumière cinematograph, Cinema Palace is also running a thematically linked film program through until June 14. This Sunday’s program, spanning the era of silent slapstick comedy and the early days of sound cinema, brings together some of the major figures of early film history, from Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to Duke Ellington and the duo Patsy Kelly and Thelma Todd. All films will be screened on 35mm.
From May 27 to 31, Bozar turns its focus to the South Korean Jeonju International Film Festival, which operates on a unique model of the “film festival as producer.” Each year, the festival selects and finances new projects by filmmakers, which are then presented the following year. Since its inception, it has supported work by filmmakers such as Tsai Ming-liang, Pedro Costa, Jean-Marie Straub, and Hong Sangsoo. Festival programmer Sung Moon will be present to introduce four evenings, opening on Wednesday with two short films by Bong Joon-ho and Hong Sangsoo.
As part of its program on fishing stories, Cinema Nova will screen Moby Dick (1956) on Friday. The film stands out for its pronounced mid-nineteenth-century look, with a “strange, subdued color scheme,” as critic Bosley Crowther described it, an effect achieved by desaturating the Technicolor film with a matching black-and-white negative. It also impresses with the physical intensity of its action scenes, which at times put the crew in real danger. Huston approaches Herman Melville’s novel not as an adventure story but as philosophical work, emphasizing the struggle between man and (divine) power. “This point was never commented on by any critic who saw the picture, not even those who championed it. They failed to recognize that the work was a blasphemy. The message of Moby Dick was hate,” Huston stated.
