Âge d’Or Weekend 2024

As every year, Âge d’Or returns to CINEMATEK for a weekend dedicated to subversive and experimental cinema, taking place on 14 and 15 December. This edition presents a programme of seven sessions organized around three distinct themes.

The first programme, ‘Reframing Violence’, arises from confronting images from Gaza that expose the unspeakable. It raises pressing questions: How can violence be represented without simplification or misdirection? What does it mean to observe suffering from a distance, and how does empathy circulate in the digital sphere? These questions are central to the work of Oraib Toukan, a Palestinian artist and researcher whose films explore the complexities of representing violence, grief, and pain. By juxtaposing tender, mundane everyday scenes with violent imagery circulating in the media or reworking restored archives of bodies in struggle, Toukan seeks to subvert, rather than directly depict, horror. British artist Miranda Pennell, whose work examines how power structures shape our perception of violence, will deliver a masterclass. Her films, including Strange Object, highlight the crucial role of imagination in interpreting historical documents such as British colonial archives.

Next, ‘Spectral Memories’ features two screenings, conceived as a dialogue between the works of filmmakers Alexandre Larose and Alexander Schellow, which illuminate cinema’s capacity to materialise the passage of time and transform reality into a waking dream. Drawing on the familial sphere and the intricate web of memories it evokes, their respective films unfold through a distinctive engagement with the mediums of film and animation. The blurred film stock, overlaid with superimposed images in Scenes de ménages, and the seventy thousand drawings that bring a single grandmother's face to life in Sie resonate with a shared impulse to echo the multiple layers of memory.

‘Crossroads’, a collaboration with Courtisane and Auguste Orts, offers three sessions that connect contemporary films with established or lesser-known works, situating experimental cinema within a dynamic historical framework. Filmmaker Stephano Miraglia presents his film Double Around the Interlude, inspiring a screening that transforms listening into a collective, politically charged act. Artist Anouk De Clercq presents a carte blanche entitled ‘Transformers’, a series of films that invite the viewer to experience transformation not just as a theme, but as an immersive journey. The films playfully explore identity and remind us that people are capable of fluidity, and that change can be messy, hilarious and completely imaginative.

The weekend concludes with Hexham Heads by Chloë Delanghe and Mattijs Driesen, alongside a session on experimental horror cinema.

You can find the full programme here.