News

Michaël Roskam’s highly praised debut Bullhead won the Best Feature Award at the Victoria Film Festival in Canada (3-12 February). This victory will surely give cast, crew and supporters alike a boost of self-confidence in view of the upcoming Academy Awards prize ceremony this Sunday. Bullhead is nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film category.

After 10 days of more than 150 films from all over the world, the film claimed the award for Best Feature at the Victoria Film Festival earlier this month. The award is one more decoration in what is now becoming a true victory march around movie fests all over the world, following among others the Jury and Critics Prize at Beaune and the Propeller Award for Best Film at the Motovun Festival. The film was also rated an exceptional 3.5 out of 4 points in the highly influential AP movie review.

Read more →

Lieven Corthouts’ Little Heaven is to screen at the Good Pitch²  Festival at The Hague (27 March). At the fest, eight documentary filmmakers working on human rights and justice projects are invited to present their films to a number of leading broadcasters and NGOs, as well as other participants who might be able to help them spread their work.

Little Heaven is the harrowing tale of an extraordinary orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city. On their thirteenth birthday, children in this particular orphanage are told that they were born with HIV. It is a hard and demanding story, but also a hopeful one, thanks to the zest for life shown by the children’s and their carers.

Read more →

Two major Flemish productions, Germaine and Time of My Life, have been boosted by a slew of positive news and numbers. Both films are based on true stories and have succeeded in catching the attention of media and public alike. Nic Balthazar’sTime of My Life was receveid enthusiastically at Berlin's EFM, while Frank Van Mechelen's Germainehas proven itself as a true box-office hit.

Films Distribution, international sales agent of Balthazar’s second feature Time of My Life, confirmed that the film drew a great deal of attention at Berlin’s European Film Market. Towards the end of March, Time of My Life will be released in The Netherlands, Luxemburg and the French-speaking region of Belgium. Time of My Life has already managed to claim two major festival awards: the Audience Award for Best Film at both the RamDam Festival and The End Festival in Amsterdam. The film was also honoured with a special mention from the jury at the prestigious Rome Film Festival.

Read more →

With Useful and Beats Of Love, the 7th ECU European Independent Film Festival (30 March- 1 April) in Paris gives a bill to two Flemish shorts. French-speaking Belgium is also represented at the fest with Filip Lamensch’s short dramedy About a Spoon.

Useful, directed by Inti Calfat, follows the struggles of an under-pressure couple. What happens when a woman can no longer prove intimately useful to herself or her husband? Although it deeply pains her, she encourages her husband to seek the comfort of another woman, a prostitute. Beats of Love is a school project by Wim Geudens. The short film is about a man obsessed by sounds.

Read more →

Koen Suidgeest’s Karla’s Arrival (La llegada de Karla) was given a bill at the very first ALBA Festival de Cine bill. The ALBA Festival took place in Brussels from 19 – 29 Januari and is the result of a collaboration between the embassies of Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Venezuela. The festival is named after the ALBA treaty, which was conducted by the governments of these countries in order to preserve their cultural identities.

Earlier on,  Karla’s Arrival (La llegada de Karla) made a screening at the Verzio Documentary Film Festival (6-10 November 2011)  in Budapest, as well as at the This Human World Festival (30 November – 10 December 2011) in Vienna. Both showings were attended by the director. The documentary also screened at the  Documenta Madrid Festival, the Prague One World Human Rights Festival and the New York International Latino Film Festival, to name just a few. The film was awarded the second prize at the Documenta festival.

Read more →

Bavo Defurne’s North Sea Texas is set for a Dutch premiere in Amsterdam’s Pathé De Munt cinema on 7 March as part of the 15th Amsterdam Gay & Lesbian Film Festival  (Pink Film Days, 15-25 March), which kicks off a week later. Meanwhile Peccadillo Pictures has signed on to handle the film's distribution in the UK and Ireland.

The Dutch premiere, which will be attended by cast and crew, is just the start of a tour in The Netherlands. North Sea Texas will screen in a number of cities, including Nijmegen and Den Haag. In March, the film will also feature in the line-up of the BUFF (13-17 March), the International Children and Young People’s Film Festival in Malmö, Sweden. North Sea Texas recently made its US debut at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and was picked up for US distribution by Strand Releasing.

Read more →

Five animated shorts from Flanders are running in the national competition of Anima (17-26 February), the annual animation celebration that takes place in Brussels. Five more films are screening in a Belgian panorama, while co-production The Monster of Nix by Rosto receives a special screening.

Anima is showcasing a wide variety of animation talent from Flanders this year. In the national competition, there's Bruno Wouters' Daddy, Don’t Forget Your Glasses, Roman Klochkov's Natasha, Boris Sverlow's VAF Wildcard-winning Shattered Past, Yves Bex's The Appointment and Tristan Morelle's The Secret Child.

Read more →

Following successful appearances at European festivals such as the Ghent International Film Festival and the Cinedans Moving Media Festival in The Netherlands, Mike Figgis’ 2010 interpretation of the CO(te)LETTE dance production is now due to appear at a number of US festivals later this year.

The film, a cinematographic capture of choreography devised by Ann Van Den Broeck, has its first screening on Saturday 17 March at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, followed by an outing at the 36th Atlanta Film Festival (23 March-1 April). The film has received wide acclaim, convincing audiences and critics alike of its aesthetic qualities: ‘a very beautiful, powerful, sensual and original piece’, says one Canadian reviewer, ‘a piece that leaves you with images and sounds that reverberate long after the performance’.

Read more →

Sahim Omar Kalifa’s short Land of the Heroes has been selected for the Tampere Film Festival (7-11 March). The selection is just the latest of 55 official invitations the film has received, including festivals such as the Worldwide Short Film Festival Toronto, the I’ve Seen Films Festival in Milan and the Curta Cinema Festival in Rio de Janeiro.

The short has also won numerous awards along the way, most notably the awards for Best Film and Best Cinematography at the South Korean Busan International Short Film Festival, and the Generation Kplus International Jury Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Last December, the film grabbed its ninth award, the Muhr Arab Second Jury Prize, worth $10,000, at the Dubai International Film Festival.

Read more →

Flemish documentary filmmaker Lode Desmet is currently touring in Canada with his film War Is Not A Game (A la guerre comme à la guerre). After its recent selection for the prestigious IDFA 2011 line-up, Desmet was invited for a screening tour by the Canadian Office National du Film.

The documentary will be shown at 12 venues across the country, two of which are military bases. The film enjoyed a winning streak in Canada at the end of last year, grabbing awards at two fests: the NFB Colin Low Award for Most Innovative Canadian Documentary at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver (6-15 June 2011) and the Golden Sheaf for Best Documentary on History at the Yorkton Film Festival (26-29 May 2011).

Read more →