Wandering Through the Garden: Courtisane 2025
From Wednesday the 2nd to Sunday the 6th of April, the 24th edition of the Courtisane film festival will take place in Ghent, Belgium. As a platform for film and audiovisual arts, the festival describes its mission to explore “the relationships between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement.” Last year, the festival underwent a major change, with the program being significantly rearranged after years. The well-known artist-in-focus section disappeared, and the programming team expanded. In the run-up to last year’s festival, Tim Maerschand interviewed Pieter-Paul Mortier, artistic director of Courtisane. “We have always felt it was important to dare to question the festival itself,” he said. “We had long felt how some questions are even more prevalent today, such as who decides what gets shown. To give space to other voices, … the team has expanded [...], raising a new question: what does giving space mean? Our initial feeling indicates that it is enriching and also confirms that it was necessary. New perspectives and angles, different choices and sensitivities.” The 2025 edition is the second year of this new direction and once again offers us an “archipelago” of different sections, curated by no less than 10 different programmers, with the “green thread” being “the hidden lives of trees, weeds, plants, and flowers, and their entanglements with our own lives.” In addition to the programming by the core Courtisane team – Pieter-Paul Mortier, Stoffel Debuysere, and Vincent Stroep – programs have been curated by Ana Júlia Silvino and Juliana Arana Toscano (in collaboration with Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola), Eva van Tongeren, Christina Stuhlberger and Eva Giolo (in collaboration with Elephy), Morgan Quaintance (in collaboration with Outlands), and Ricardo Matos Cabo, along with collaborations with Film Fest Gent, Kunsthal Gent, Arts Cinema OFFoff, and Sabzian.
One implicit artist-in-focus is the English artist, filmmaker, writer, poet, gardener, and gay rights activist Derek Jarman. Together with Film Fest Gent, Courtisane presents ‘Derek Jarman: Archaeologies of Sound and Soul’, a programme that brings together his informal trilogy – The Last of England (1987), The Garden (1990), and Blue (1993) – alongside a selection of his short films, conversations and performances.
“So I scrabble in the rubbish, an archaeologist who stumbles across a buried film. An archaeologist who projects his private world along a beam of light into the arena, till all goes dark at the end of the performance, and we go home. Home is where one should be, as Dorothy said, clicking her ruby slippers, there’s no place like it. Now, I’m not going to duck it, ART is the key. Those who don’t know it simply don’t live, they exist. It, of course – is an approach to existence, an inner approach to the outer world; it’s not just words and music, but gardens, sweeping, the washing-up; it needs no money this archaeology of soul, tho’ the powers grab it and run it through the projector to blind you. An artist is engaged in a dig. Deep down, depth, ‘the way up is the way down, ...’” – Derek Jarman
His final feature, Blue, strips cinema to its barest elements, enveloping the viewer in an expanse of Yves Klein blue while voices and sound conjure an unseen world. Blue stands as a singularly poetic and affecting account of living and dying with AIDS. On Sabzian, Rebecca Jane Arthur seizes the question: “What on earth do you mean, ‘a blank blue film’?”. As part of the programme, composer Simon Fisher Turner, who scored many of Jarman’s feature films – from Caravaggio (1986), through to Jarman’s final work Blue – will have a conversation with filmmaker and musician Luke Fowler about Jarman’s films and filmmaking process, with a particular focus on the remarkable use of sound and music.
Taking inspiration from Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, a volume of his journals written between 1989 and 1990 on the process of tending his famous garden at Prospect Cottage, the programme ‘Still There Are Seeds to Be Gathered’ explores the garden as “a site of resistance, regeneration, and worldmaking”. Jarman’s writings reject a romanticised vision of nature in favour of a poetics of survival – of plants thriving in unlikely places, just as marginalised communities persist in the face of social and political upheaval. His garden at Prospect Cottage, set against the stark backdrop of a nuclear power station, embodies an ethos of care and improvisation, of tending to life amid crisis. This programme gathers films by Pierre Creton, Elke Marhöfer, Marie Menken, Margaret Tait, Gunvor Nelson, and many others, whose work engages with gardening, seeding, rewilding, and foraging, challenging the dominant logics of extraction and extinction. As Jarman wrote, “There are no walls or fences. My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.” The programme also features Magino Monogatari — Yosan-hen: Eiga no tame no eiga [The Magino Village Story – Raising Silkworms] (1977) by Ogawa Productions, a collective known for its deep engagement with rural life and resistance in Japan. Complementing this selection, the side programme Sanrizuka Notes presents two films by Fukuda Katsuhiko, a former member of Ogawa Productions. Shot on 8mm between 1979 and 1985, these films are part of a series documenting the farmers’ opposition to the construction of Narita International Airport. On the occasion of the film programmes dedicated to Ogawa Shinsuke and Ogawa Pro at CINEMATEK and Tsuchimoto Noriaki at Courtisane Festival in 2019, Sabzian collaborated on the publication Of Sea and Soil: The Cinema of Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Ogawa Shinsuke. Several of those texts remain available on Sabzian.
Following the recent collaboration on the publication In the Midst of the End of the World: António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro (2024), Courtisane and Sabzian present a new digital version of Ana (1982), the duo’s second feature film. “In Ana, the trees, the roads, the stones of the houses almost have names. Everything is a junction; nothing is anonymous. The film is a consoling buzzing: the sound of the wind causes the images to swell and flow back like a sea,” writes Serge Daney in one of the texts included in the publication, which is set to appear on Sabzian before the festival’s opening. This year’s festival catalogue also features a short text by Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, who writes: “Watching Ana was a great emotional experience. It is a film that elevates the spirit, with a sensitivity, a finesse and a very particular poetic conception of the image. [...] More than a legend, it is a tale, a secret dream that haunts us long afterwards.” Get your copy at the festival book shop!
A key highlight of the festival is the screening of Wang Bing’s full ten-hour Youth trilogy, in which the Chinese documentary filmmaker observes the daily lives of a group of young textile workers. Each year, these workers leave their rural villages to migrate to Zhili, a manufacturing city 150 kilometers from Shanghai. Over the past years, we have dedicated extensive attention to Wang’s work on Sabzian. Previously, we co-published an English-language publication with Courtisane, also available online as an Issue, which aims to trace Wang’s trajectory through a series of writings and interviews published between 2009 and 2017.
On Saturday, Courtisane will welcome the Italian artist and filmmaker Diego Marcon for a presentation of his audiovisual work. Marcon's work is rooted in a deeply conceptual approach to the moving image, expanding across film, video installations, and sculpture. He presents his work in dialogue with short works by Harun Farocki, Giulia Guidi, Peter Wachtlër, Basma al-Sharif, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Bill Plympton, and Johann Lurf.
This year, the festival opens and closes with two Belgian films. On the opening night, L’arbre de l’authenticité (2025) by Sammy Baloji, delves into the layered histories of the Yangambi INERA Research Station, once a thriving centre of colonial agricultural science on the banks of the Congo River. Through the voices of Paul Panda Farnana and Abiron Beirnaert, two scientists who worked there between 1910 and 1950, the film traces the lasting imprint of colonial modernity and environmental injustice. Baloji, whose work explores the cultural and industrial heritage of the Democratic Republic of Congo, reveals how histories of extraction continue to shape the present. Closing the festival, Kapital Europe (2025) portrays two migrant workers in Brussels – Reginald, a Romanian construction worker, and Niki, a Greek bicycle courier. The new film by Brussels-based filmmaker Ben De Raes marks the conclusion of the five-day festival in which the boundaries of the cinematic garden are explored and expanded.
