Week 41/2024

This week, Ghent will be the epicenter for cinema in Belgium, with its annual film festival kicking off on the 9th of October. From the extensive program, we’ve made a selection of films we are particularly looking forward to (re)discover. Among the selected films is Miséricorde by genre-crossing French director Alain Guiraudie, who continues his exploration of repressed desires and the social function of taboo through a murder mystery dipped in black comedy. After the screening, Nina de Vroome, member of Sabzian’s editorial board, will talk with the director about the genesis of the film and the interweaving of his practices as a novelist, screenwriter and director.

Also screened at the festival is the documentary Was hast du gestern geträumt, Parajanov? by Iranian-German filmmaker Faraz Fesharaki. Based on recorded skype conversations between the filmmaker and his family in Iran, the film depicts how intimate family relations are affected by state oppression. At the same time, it is a reflection on the camera’s double function of registration and construction, putting to the test Abbas Kiarostami’s saying that “the camera doesn’t lie.”

But before heading to Ghent, make sure to catch Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees at CINEMATEK in Brussels, the last installment of his Koker trilogy. The film revisits the series’ central motif, the relationship between art and life, through a love story that unfolds on a film set. As in his previous films, Kiarostami uses the dramatic potential of Iran’s rural landscape, letting his characters mark the vast mountain plains by drawing geometrical lines on the screen as they run or drive through them. Shot from a distance, the final scene culminates in an enigmatic ending that relies entirely on the expressivity of the protagonists’ movement through space while running through the olive groves.