Week 24/2025

This week offers some opportunities to meet curators and filmmakers.

At De Cinema in Antwerp this Wednesday, Maryam K. Hedayat, director of Studio Sarab, will introduce two films she co-curated together with Roya Keshavarz: A Move (Elahe Esmaili, 2024) and My Stolen Planet (Farahnaz Sharifi, 2024). Both poetically and politically, the films explore the themes of memory, resistance and identity in contemporary Iran.  The tension between women’s private and public lives in Iran lies at the heart of these films.

New Women, a silent film from 1935 by Chusheng Cai, shows the struggle of an intellectual who’s striving for independence.  She sees herself confronted with the unsurpassable restrictions on women who aspire to a life in the public eye. This screening will be accompanied by live piano music at CINEMATEK on Thursday.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Tailor will screen at Bozar on Wednesday. In this film, the exterior world where social and feminist struggles take place no longer exists; instead, the body is presented as a psychedelic landscape shaped by the gaze of others. Following the screening, there will be a Q&A with Paravel moderated by filmmaker and curator Eva van Tongeren.