For the past six years, Sabzian has curated an agenda to provide our readers in Belgium and surroundings with a roadmap through the diverse range of local cinema listings, supporting a network of events, screenings and exhibitions. For each film, a Film Page is created that unites information on the film with quotes from various sources, fragments of essays, reviews or interviews, woven together like a patchwork, hopefully inciting you to read further. Aside from screenings, those Film Pages are accessible on Sabzian through the director-tags, also available on the Search-page in alphabetical order. Now that we have to maintain physical distance and cinemas have closed down, our experience of cinema has become a solitary delight. But in this time of confinement, we can find our cinephile community in the non-endemic space of the online environment. In the next weeks, Sabzian will select three films a week, available on online platforms, in an effort to propose imagined film-gatherings that can be attended by everyone, independent of their domicile. We will select open source films, but we will also guide you to some important online distribution platforms.
This first week, we kick off with a milestone of Belgian cinema Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman. CINEMATEK, the Royal Belgian Film Archive, makes their restored digitalisation available in Belgium via Lumiere, UniversCiné and Uncut.
Filmmaker, Canyon Cinema founder and San Francisco Cinematheque co-founder Bruce Baillie passed away on 10 April at the age of 88. In remembrance of him, Sabzian selected his film Quick Billy. The film is on view here.
Film at Lincoln Center is screening Bela Tarr’s Sátántangó in their virtual cinema. If you are located in the United States, you can rent the film here.
Film Pages
