Week 7/2025

As part of the Johan van der Keuken retrospective at CINEMATEK, French filmmaker and writer Thierry Nouel will present his documentary on van der Keuken, with whom he shared a close friendship. The documentary is both an ode to van der Keuken’s cinema and a portrait of the filmmaker himself. Nouel follows him to Paris, the city of his youth, and asks him about his films, offering a glimpse at van der Keuken’s intentions when filming. What happens when the filmmaker is the one being filmed? Van der Keuken becomes “L’arosseur arossé” in a film that integrates some of his stylistic traits. The film is followed by The Unanswered Question, van der Keuken’s filmic answer to the music piece of the same name by Charles Ives.

Those who missed the cycle of screenings of Meeuwen sterven in de haven (1955) organized by Avila last fall have another chance to catch this classic of Belgian cinema at KASKcinema. During a rather uninspiring period in the country’s cinema, Rik Kuypers, Ivo Michiels and Roland Verhavert joined forces to create a film that would mark the beginning of a new era of filmmaking in Belgium. Unlike their contemporaries, the trio was concerned with form and looked abroad for aesthetic inspiration, which earned them Belgium’s first selection at the Cannes film festival. The screening will be introduced by the publishers of the recently published book Belgische Cinema in 24 frames.

With Ma nuit chez Maud, Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Éric Rohmer looks at love through the eyes of a catholic, a Marxist and an atheist. In typical Rohmer fashion, casual encounters lead to general reflections about morality, carefully balancing lightness with heaviness. Yet, rather than merely illustrating philosophical ideas, everyday life in Rohmer’s films embodies abstract questions in its very concreteness.