CONNEXT 2022

It’s still a hugely sensitive and inflammatory subject which few in Belgium dare to talk about. In the summer of 1942, the local police assisted the Nazi forces as they rounded up Jews in raids across Antwerp. These Jews were deported and many died in Hitler’s death camps. The grim episode is the subject of The Last Jewish Summer, a feature documentary which Thom M. Vander Beken is pitching at CONNEXT.

Constructed from home videos from the 1990s and early 2000s, Love Is Not An Orange, which world-premiered in Leipzig, paints a fascinating portrait of the impact independence had on Moldova, formerly part of the Soviet Union, a country that struggled to make the transition from communism to capitalism, and all seen through the prism of family relationships.

Anne is a very strong swimmer who can hold her breath for three minutes and 40 seconds. When she is underwater, she feels happy and in control of her environment. But Anne also has Asperger’s Syndrome, and in everyday life, noise and commotion upset and distract her. She is the subject of Under The Surface, the feature work-in-progress by Guido Verelst, who talks to BDE.

The prolific Flemish doc producer Diplodokus attends CONNEXT with two series projects, the 4-part work-in-progress DNA, about the ongoing genetic revolution, and the completed 3-part series Catching the Pirate King which looks at how Belgian police became involved in the apprehension of leading Somalian pirates and helped put them on trial. Both series are co-directed by Maarten and Lennart Stuyck, who talks to BDE.

Producer Hans Everaert of Menuetto Film discusses Manu Riche’s Carbon, a film about the influence of carbon fuel over the last 100 years of history in Europe and the Middle East. The film is based around three trips, to Italy and Iraq, and the third to Ukraine where Riche originally planned to film in coal mines and to talk about wars that have been fought over carbon. But then war intervened for real…

Flemish filmmaker Luc Vrydaghs profiles the late Jan Hoet, one of the most controversial European curators of recent decades, charting his personal evolution from insecurity as a young man towards de facto papal status within the modern art world. But at the very core of Hoet’s artistic sense was something altogether more classical, the titular Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by Jan van Eyck, which resides in the Flemish town of Ghent.

Indian Kinshuk Surjan’s new project tells a story that is tragic and appalling on both personal and wider societal levels. The film concerns the hundreds of thousands of suicides by farmers in the Indian subcontinent which have resulted from legislation that has, effectively, made them economic slaves to large corporations. But as the director explained to Business Doc Europe, the widows left behind are fighting back…

The stereotype of the climate activist is of an Extinction Rebellion-style protester, dressed like an old hippy, holding up the traffic in a busy city centre or blockading the petrol pumps. Roger Cox, the protagonist of Nic Balthazar’s new film Duty Of Care, screening online at CONNEXT 2022, is in a very different mould. The director explains how to Business Doc Europe.

Flemish DJ and filmmaker Pascal Garnier remembers vividly the circumstances in which he first watched the Dutch-made 1986 music documentary Big Fun In The Big Town, which featured artists like Grandmaster Flash, LL Cool J and Run-DMC. As a teenager looking for his own “thing and identity,” he was strongly influenced by the film’s “direct and intimate view of what it was like in New York back then,” he tells BDE.

Jazz and Cold War politics are intimately entwined in Flemish director Johan Grimonprez’s latest doc feature, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a work-in-progress at CONNEXT. The film explores the circumstances which led to musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach staging their own protest at the UN against the murder of Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba. The director talks to BDE.