Week 20/2026

The week starts off with a screening of Une simple histoire (1959), organized by Sabzian at Cinema RITCS. Marcel Hanoun’s feature debut follows a single mother and her daughter drifting through Paris in search of work and shelter, until misfortune leaves them homeless. Combining neorealism with Bresson-like minimalism, Hanoun creates a melancholic portrait of exclusion and isolation. Despite his sense for aesthetic innovation being admired by notable filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas and Jean-Luc Godard, Hanoun never received the same recognition as his contemporaries from the French Nouvelle Vague. It is only recently that the film has been recognized for its uncompromising iconoclasm, which is particularly evident in its experimentation with the relationship between image and sound. The screening will be followed by À la rencontre de Marcel Hanoun (1994) by Bert Beyens, which follows Marcel Hanoun at work.

Also on Monday, CINEMATEK shows Rapt (1934) by Dimitri Kirsanoff, one of the first Swiss sound films. It captures the tensions between two fictitious Swiss villages separated by a mountain. Although it has synchronized sound, stylistically, it is a peculiar film that hardly uses any dialogue and instead continues to apply the conventions of silent cinema through visual storytelling. Its expressive mise-en-scène and editing are accompanied by an experimental soundtrack consisting of sound effects that take on a narrative function.

Aleksandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf (2025), screened at BOZAR, was shot entirely on a Sony Ericsson cellphone from 2008. A father sets off to look for his missing daughter. He visits all the places she could have been, accompanied by his daughter’s invisible friend who appears only as a voice-over. Like the magic-realist story, the pixelated images evoke questions of presence and absence, as they rely on the viewer’s imagination to fill in the gaps. Koberidze finds unexpected beauty in the camera’s struggle to capture light; a struggle that, although it constitutes the essence of a camera, is obscured by modern technology. As Koberidze explains, “The limitation becomes a gift.”