“Clattering beer bottles, plastic garden chairs dragged across the bluestone floor and piles of mattresses with early slumberers,” critic Liv Laveyne reported on the ​‘Eerste Langste Nacht van de Experimentele Film’ (the First Longest Night of Experimental Film) twenty years ago at the Caermersklooster, now Kunsthal Gent. ​“Over three hundred people braved the stormy weather to indulge in forty experimental films, a good eight hours of viewing.” There, the plan was expressed to ​“found a full-fledged cinema under the name Off-Off Cinema”. And it came to pass: our first regular film screening at the small beguinage O.L.V. Ter Hoye (Klein Begijnhof) took place on the 15^th of September 2003. ​“The future for experimental film in Ghent looks bright,” Laveyne concluded. ​“To be continued!”

Discover our full spring programme running until May 2023 in our folder [PDF], which can also be found at various cultural venues!

“I write you in images,” muses the late Jean-Luc Godard in Scénario de Sauve qui peut (la vie), a video that substituted for a paper script. In sensual, lyrical and plastic ways, his oeuvre transcends any distinction between the ​‘filmic’ and the ​‘literary’. The ideal opener of our new program focusing on film and language.

Walter Benjamin once described a language game in which he asked an 11-year-old girl to construct sentences with about five given words. He called it ​‘Phantasiesätze’, fantasy sentences. It inspired the short film of the same name that Helena Wittmann included in a carte blanche around her new film, Human Flowers of Flesh – screening at Film Fest Gent. In line with Benjamin’s experimental text, this fall series is a shifting and connecting of different programs to write a story.

Our folder [PDF] with the full program through December 2022 can be found at various cultural venues!

“I’m an amateur who makes films like a painter, paints like a sculptor, sculpts like a musician and makes music like a filmmaker… sometimes all at once.” Michael Snow perfectly expresses the keynote of our new film season that flirts more than ever with the other arts.

In Snow’s classic Wavelength – one of the many films in the program – a 45-minute-long zoom ultimately lands on a picture of waves, the infinite sea, as horizon and as vanishing point. Our spring program explores the limits of the medium and seeks the answers mostly in nature and landscape.

In At Sea, we experience the splendor and intensity of the ocean and the vibrant color grid of a container ship through the eyes of Peter Hutton. Just like Rose Lowder – whose work will be accompanied by live music as well – he was trained as a painter and sculptor. More films this season evoke the feeling ​“to be at sea”. Get carried away.

Our program folder can be found at various cultural locations!

Kunsthal Gent presents a second edition of its Zomersalon. In July and August 2021, BUY LOCAL #2 brings together the work of 742 Ghentians, both in Kunsthal Gent and online. Support an artist and buy work at this major exhibition with a cross-section of Ghent’s visual arts scene.

We had to wait a long time for it, but on Monday 14 June our cinema will reopen with Bioscopic Books: Final book presentation & screening! To ensure that everything runs smoothly, we ask you to book in advance.

Evening screenings in theaters are still a bit of a wait, but don’t despair (too much). As part of the Bioscopic Books exhibition in Kunsthal Gent, OFFoff presents in its cinema a film program in loop that explores the relationships between speaking and writing, reading and looking, showing and imagining. Reservations for the exhibition are required.