The Brussels screening collective Cinema Parenthèse pays tribute to the Australian filmmaking duo Arthur and Corinne Cantrill with a three-day film programme. The programme kicks off this Sunday at iMAL with a selection of films from the 1960s and 1970s. On Monday and Tuesday, two additional evenings will follow at Art Cinema OFFoff. Having made over 150 films, the Cantrills are among the most significant figures in experimental cinema. They are known for exploring the Australian landscape and researching the “three-colour separation process.” On Wednesday, Sabzian will publish a primer by Arindam Sen on the duo, offering insight into their trajectory and the (political) stakes of their work. As he writes: “[T]he Cantrills’ absolute commitment to experimental over descriptive forms does not mean that their relationship to the world is closed off. Quite the opposite, they define this relationship on their own terms.”
Also in Brussels, CINEMATEK and Courtisane are organizing a retrospective of the cinema of Billy Woodberry. He was a key figure of the L.A. Rebellion: a collective of Black filmmakers from UCLA who broke with Hollywood depictions of Black life in America. His acclaimed debut Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), co-created with Charles Burnett, stood out for its subtle tone. Woodberry’s powerful, underrecognized cinema resonates far beyond the U.S. and speaks to struggles across the African diaspora. The retrospective starts Thursday featuring Mário, his latest film about Angolan anti-colonial activist Mário de Andrade, with Woodberry in attendance.
On Wednesday, KASKcinema screens Only Yesterday, a Japanese animated film by Studio Ghibli. While Ghibli films are known for blending fantastical elements with deep human insight, Only Yesterday opts for realism. The story follows Taeko, a 27-year-old Tokyo office worker who reflects on her 1960s childhood while visiting the countryside. This contemplative work stands as one of Takahata’s most mature films, offering a reflective and humane exploration of memory, identity, and personal growth.
A twenty-seven-year-old office worker travels to the countryside while reminiscing about her childhood in Tokyo.
EN
“Takahata seamlessly mixes the two pasts together, with Taeko occasionally even meeting her younger self. The two animation styles complement each other in a delicate but pronounced way and the temporal leaps are effortless. The 1980s are animated in a realistic style, etching out the lines on the faces of the characters or noting the perfect detail in a single head of safflower pollinated by a bee. The 1960s are shown in a more stylised manner with pastel, almost diffused edges to the frames, sketched out with items of memorabilia. For the most part Only Yesterday is so grounded in reality that, in the brief moments when it departs from realism, the effect is startling '. When schoolgirl Taeko first experiences 'teenage romance she is so elated that she literally walks upwards into the clouds. Only Yesterday was considered something of a gamble – devoid of any easy-to-market, advert-friendly fantasy presence it had to stand up on the basis of the quality of its writing.”
"It would have some value if we portrayed kids like this in film. That's all I had. But I thought, 'it won't work as a film'. So I gave it up and threw the original away, only to pick it up every now and then. However, once I knew such material, nothing else seemed interesting when you're working on kids features. But I couldn't do it. I didn't have the skills. And the only person that seemed to have such skills was Takahata."
“If Miyazaki hadn't been a producer, we wouldn't have been able to make the film. The plot is too complicated compared to the usual films. People are wary of this kind of story. The heroine is 27-years old and it is not a dramatic story. These are not the classic elements of an animated film. Normally, no financier would accept. They would all be too scared. But producer Miyazaki reassured them with aplomb. They thought the idea must be good since it came from him.”
“We know each other perfectly. We always have a lot of criticism to do with each other. But if someone dares to criticize him and I don't like it, I stand up for him!”
Mário tells the story of Mário de Andrade (1928-1990) pan-African intellectual, activist, diplomat and poet who fought all his life for the building of African nations with the fierce conviction that independence from colonialism was the beginning and not the end of the struggle. From Paris where he establishes his intellectual home, to independent Angola, Mário spends a life in exile working and fighting for African sovereignty.
EN
“Are even the best and brightest revolutionary movements doomed to inevitable compromise, betrayal and failure? That question haunts this documentary, a biography of Angolan-born Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928–1990), a key figure in African revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles. Told in a direct, informative style, combining present-day interviews, still photography and archival footage, Mário eschews excessive dramatisation and sentimentality. Legendary American filmmaker Billy Woodberry, a key figure in the L.A. Rebellion film movement of the 1970s and 1980s, brings a pan-African sensibility to the subject, matching de Andrade’s own. Mário returns us to a time when revolution was imagined internationally, not held hostage to nationalist ideologies. Beyond the rich history it recounts, Mário is notable as an interwoven portrait of other central players of the time, including Agostinho Neto, Amílcar Cabral and Mário’s brother, Joaquim, a Catholic priest. There are also interludes with fabled, politically committed filmmakers, like Andrade’s wife Sarah Maldoror (Sambizanga, 1972) and Chris Marker. Don’t miss the final moment when Andrade, asked about the fate of revolutions, brilliantly proposes his theory, and flashes a smile so radiant it’s telling.”
“Combining photographs, archival footage, documents of all sorts, testimonies and songs, Mário weaves a tapestry around Mário Pinto de Andrade, a man whose life was itself a richly layered tapestry. Pinto de Andrade was a multi-faceted figure, moving through several countries in exile or in hiding, working across different literary genres, forging connections to other prominent names – including a close friendship with Amílcar Cabral and marriage to Sarah Maldoror – bouncing between various political activities and organizing colloquiums with Black writers before ultimately serving as the first president of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola. Yet despite having his fingers in so many pies, the word that his friends most use to define him is integrity. The same can be said of Billy Woodberry’s style. Unlike the early work of his L.A. Rebellion predecessors Charles Burnett and Haile Gerima, which was jagged and fresh, Woodberry’s cinema was mature, well-rounded and tranquil in pace from the very beginning. Here he draws on an impressive amount of research material to create a suitably robust weave, as enduring as the bonds of Pan-African culture that Mário represents.”
Pascal Bianchini:About the way you made the film, what is remarkable is that it deals with a personal story, with a biographical trajectory about someone who had relationships with many people, as a friend, a brother, a comrade, and so on. But also, at the same time, you have the history of decolonisation, of the national liberation movement. How did you manage to follow these two parallel tracks in your film? It always shifts from one aspect to the other one, because Mário’s life was closely linked to this collective story? I suppose it must have been a lot of work for you to find the archives, the interviews, to read books and so on. How did you work to make this film?
Billy Woodberry: As Chris Marker says in his movie The Last Bolshevik, when you choose a figure, you realise that you’re making a story about a figure with a certain itinerary, and that you’re also making a story about a whole epoch, and so many related things. So, in this case, because of what Mário de Andrade was involved in, the moment when he comes about, the way that the process unfolds, the realisation of independence in African countries, etc., it allows us to suggest the larger context, the larger relationships and meanings. Reading books about this was a privilege and a pleasure. I am not tired of that thing. I have worked with different people. We were excited about the issue, and then it became a challenge of finding the best material and how to present it. We have a subject who was involved in that himself, who was generous towards others and gave us a lot of information about others and their contribution and describes different aspects of the process very well. The other thing is the idea of decolonisation. In fact, people are more interested in the concept, but they’re not so knowledgeable about the substance. They’re not interested in the leaders, and they’re not interested in the people. They’re interested in the symbols and the things to make arguments about it. But some people tried to make a difference and some of them were lost in the process. There is something to learn about that.
Billy Woodberry in conversation with Pascal Bianchini3
