Week 5/2025

Brussels’s Cinema Nova presents a mini cycle of American filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross, showcasing an oeuvre that straddles the line between fiction and documentary to create fragmented portraits of everyday America. On Sunday, they screen Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020), a film chronicling the final night of a Las Vegas dive bar. Shot the day before Donald Trump’s presidential election, the brothers captured 18 consecutive hours in an active bar. Yet, as Nick Pinkerton noted, certain “quiet acts of cinematic imposture” underpin the film: the bar, which is in fact located in New Orleans, isn’t actually closing and the main characters are played by actors. Along with the regulars and staff on screen, they form a secretive plot that defines the film.

As part of their Classics program, CINEMATEK is screening Victims of Sin (1951) this week. A highlight of “the golden age of Mexican cinema,” the film features Cuban dancer-actress Ninón Sevilla in the lead role. Sevilla made quite an impression In the then cinephile circles of Cahiers du Cinéma. Robert Lachenay, a pseudonym for François Truffaut, wrote: “With her inflamed gaze, fiery mouth, everything is elevated in Ninón (the forehead, the eyelashes, the nose, the upper lip, the throat, the tone when she gets angry), the perspectives flee vertically like arrows shot[.]” Set in cabarets, with elaborate music and dance sequences, the film is one of the finest examples of the caberatera-film, a subgenre of the popular “prostitute melodrama”. Now considered one of the greatest Mexican filmmakers of the 20th century, a notable anecdote about Fernández is that, after fleeing Mexico in 1923 following a failed revolutionary coup, he settled in Hollywood, where he notably served as a stand-in for actor Douglas Fairbanks.

A few years ago, a handful of films by Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai were digitally restored and are now being re-released. Known for his lyrical and melancholic portrayal of urban love and relationships – often elliptically told, brightly neon-coloured, with music video-like techniques such as slow-motion, speed-ups, or colour collages – Happy Together presents a portrait of a broken relationship, with Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung playing a couple who travel to Buenos Aires. “To me, Happy Together applies not only to the relationship between two persons, but also the relationship between one person and his past. If people are at peace with themselves and their past, this is the start of being able to be happy with somebody else.”