Week 13/2026
We start the week at Art Cinema OFFoff with a programme centred on Images du monde visionnaire (1963), the short film that Belgian-French writer and artist Henri Michaux made with filmmaker Éric Duvivier. Best known for his surreal travel writings through real and imaginary lands, Michaux also developed a distinctive visual practice associated with informal art and lyrical abstraction. From the mid-1950s onwards, his experiments with hallucinogens, such as mescaline, shaped both his writing and his drawing. In Images du monde visionnaire, these altered perceptions are translated into moving images. The screening places Michaux’s film in dialogue with Duvivier’s La femme 100 têtes (1967), inspired by the surrealist collages of Max Ernst and Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), in which mythological figures such as Shiva, Pan, and Hecate appear in psychedelic ritual. The programme is connected to the Henri Michaux exhibition at the Vandenhove Centre for Architecture and Art in Ghent (5 March – 23 May), which situates the film within Michaux’s broader exploration of visionary states across drawing, poetry, and experimental cinema.
The following day, De Cinema in Antwerp shows Anne-Marie Miéville’s Mon cher sujet (1988). The film moves between three generations of women – daughter, mother, and grandmother – whose lives intersect through shifting relationships with one another and with the men around them. Reflecting on the film, critic Jacques Aumont suggests that its subject is nothing less than the subject of cinema itself: “I love you – you love me, or rather, I love you – you don’t love me.” In Miéville’s work, love, lineage, and storytelling circulate across generations, forming what Aumont describes as “generations that move in solidarity.”
We continue with a screening of Borhane Alaouié’s Beyrouth A’Lika [Beirut the Encounter] (1981), shown at 8pm on 27 March at Becue (Chaussée de Forêt 138), a newly opened artistic space. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Daoud Alaouié. The film is in Arabic with English subtitles, and entry is donation-based (€8–15). Doors open at 7pm, with Lebanese food available before and after the screening, as well as an art auction and live music and DJs afterwards. All proceeds from the evening will go to organisations working on the ground in Lebanon to provide food, shelter, and essential supplies to over one million displaced people.
To end the week, Caillou Film Festival in Brussels brings together Med Hondo’s Mes voisins (1971), Jocelyne Saab’s Imaginary Postcard (2016), and Fairuz Ghammam’s Cultuur (2022) within a programme dedicated to migration, territory, and political struggle, accompanied by discussions and workshops that foreground cinema as a space for collective memory and resistance.
