Week 50/2024

This week’s selection involves art in film – and a dog. 

After the last-minute cancellation of the screening of El sol del membrillo (1992) last march, our patience will be rewarded with a new chance to see this mesmerizing visual meditation on the beauty of the natural world by Víctor Erice. Film historian Steven Jacobs will introduce this documentary on the work of the painter Antonio Lopez. The film captures the artist’s attempt to paint the quince tree in his garden while the seasons change and the sunlight reveals infinite nuances of colour and shadow.

In Brussels these coming months, you will have the chance to see the oeuvre of Ulrike Ottinger during the retrospective in the CINEMATEK. Ottinger began her career as a painter, lithographer and photographer, and her films are distinctly the work of an artist. She made a number of ethnographic documentaries that have continued to inspire her fiction, infusing her compositions with eccentric rituals and florid costumes. This week, Cinema Ritcs presents Freak Orlando (1981). Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel, it is a camp tale of the main character of Orlando who traverses time to meet the freaks of each century.

In De Studio in Antwerp, film scholar and teacher at Ritcs Wouter Hessels will give a lecture on Italian Neorealism before the screening of Umberto D. (1952) by Vittorio De Sica. Film critic Vernon Young stated that “no subject is important until awakened by art” when writing about the film. The story of Umberto D. resembles Wendy and Lucy (2008) by Kelly Reichardt, a touching film in which a homeless woman is struggling to make ends meet in America during the financial crisis. Her dog is her only friend, just like the dog of the retired Umberto, who is threatened to be kicked out of his social housing.