Week 5/2026

The first film of this week is called Met Dieric Bouts. André Delvaux wrote the film together with author Ivo Michiels. It is not about Dieric Bouts, but with him. Delvaux and Michiels enter the pictorial universe of the early Flemish Master, while simultaneously filming the very process of writing, shooting and composing the soundtrack. The work of Bouts becomes both guide and companion. After the screening, Wouter Hessels will speak with Sigrid Bousset, biographer of Michiels. Reflecting on the act of writing a biography about her literary idol, she once said: “Ivo had fallen from his mythical construct, and thereby I had fallen from mine.”

In Douglas Sirk’s melodrama All That Heaven Allows, a widow falls deeply in love with her gardener. Consequently, she receives a television set from her children , who aim to silence her desire. When the TV salesman installs the set beside her Christmas tree, she collapses onto the couch and watches her own fractured reflection in the dark screen, as he boasts: “All you have to do is turn that dial and you have all the company you want, right there on the screen. Drama, comedy, life’s parade at your fingertips.” She is offered all that heaven allows, on the condition that she remains a quiet spectator.

In Letter from an Unknown Woman by Max Ophüls, a young woman knows exactly who she loves and why their fates are intertwined. The man of her desires, a celebrated concert pianist, barely remembers her. She is his admirer, his audience. In a letter she writes to him, her tragic position is revealed: she is condemned to remain both spectator and specter. “By the time you read this letter, I may be dead. If this reaches you, you will know how I became yours when you didn’t even know who I was or that I even existed.”