Discover our full spring pro­gram, run­ning until May, in our bro­chu­re [PDF], avai­la­ble at cul­tu­ral venues across Flanders and Brussels!

Trekkerriff. A made-up word we borrow this season from the title of Will Hindle’s final film. In it, he looks back on ​“the things that have been abandoned along the side of the road, the inevitable debris that is evidence not of loss but of a life lived.” These are the words of his partner Michele ​“Shellie” Fleming – we bring their virtuoso 16mm work together for the first time. Ken and Flo Jacobs crossed paths 65 years ago while hitchhiking and recently passed away shortly after one another. With found footage, they activated the tension between past and present, stillness and movement. Other programs explore how images circulate endlessly through media networks, how women in Niger bypass the country’s travel ban by sending images via WhatsApp, glitter filter and all, or how the Sudanese Film Group continues to work from exile.

“I’m a trip without a traveller,” scribbled Belgian poet Sophie Podolski in The Country Where Everything is Permitted (1972). Her only book is a form of automatic writing, driven by the phonetic texture of language. Podolski lived with schizophrenia and was part of the artist community around the Montfaucon Research Center in Ixelles. She is at the center of a film portrait of this group, which sought to ​“overthrow the semantic order.” A little further on in Brussels, the Club Antonin Artaud was active. Offering an alternative to hospitalization, people with mental health vulnerabilities transformed their fantasies and traumas into collective films. Boris Lehman guided the group for almost twenty years and is our guest.

“Drop out. Withdraw into your inner self,” urged the French-Belgian writer Henri Michaux. In Images of the Visionary World, he evokes his altered state of consciousness under the influence of mescaline and hashish. Born stateless, Podolski, too, created her own country of words with her acid-tinged pen, but took her life at the age of twenty-one. Michaux found escape routes in his imaginary travel stories through real and fictional lands. In Genet à Chatila, we follow in the footsteps of Jean Genet through the landscapes of the Palestinian resistance, marked by the loss of homeland. The French writer spent four hours in the Chatila refugee camp shortly after the massacre in 1982. In Prisoner of Love (1986), he questions the limits of language in capturing that experience. Like a mantra, the film repeats the note that Genet wrote at the top of the final proofs, shortly before his death: ​“To shelter all the images of language and to use them, for they are in the desert, where you must go to look for them.” All roads converge in a season set in motion by the surrealist André Breton.

Atelier OFFoff needs your opinion! In 2026, Atelier OFFoff wants to take further steps to grow into a sustainable project that meets some of the needs within the current Belgian audiovisual landscape. Through this survey, we aim to reach everyone interested in experimental film and in building a stronger community around it.

Watch the Q&A with Victor Van Rossem and Blake Williams following the screening of their new films at OFFoff on May 26. Victor’s film was shot and developed during a residency at Atelier OFFoff. On October 8 and 9, Victor and Blake will present the films in a shared program in the Currents section of the New York Film Festival, where they will once again engage in conversation with each other.

Discover our full fall program, running until December 2025, in our brochure [PDF], available at cultural venues across Flanders and Brussels!

Double exposure brings depth and texture by exposing a film frame twice – a technique we adopt this season as a programming principle. We devote consecutive evenings to our guests Friedl Kubelka and Karl Kels, a former student of her ex-partner Peter Kubelka. In Kels’ case, this even means a complete retrospective of his work. We also present a double bill at unique locations: the Balat Greenhouse in the Botanic Garden of Meise and the Belvedère of the Boekentoren.

In Nightshift and Us and the Night, figures and stories only cross paths at night, in a hotel lobby and a library respectively. ​“It’s a story about stories,” filmmaker Audrey Lam says about the latter film. Several of our programs cast a different light on existing narratives, such as our evening on experimental westerns, or Twice a Man Twice – Gregory Markopoulos’s modern retelling of the myth of Hippolytus. We show the film doubled, running simultaneously forwards and backwards. After a screening in Lausanne, we are able to present this expanded version for the first time since 1966.

Twice a Man Twice begins – or ends, if you will – with a full five minutes of black leader accompanied by the sound of rain, after which Markopoulos leads us into the story with his signature flash frames. Over two weekends, we transform our space into a Flashlight Cinema, inviting you to project the images on the filmstrips yourself using a flashlight. Oona Libens also works with light and shadow play, masks, and dual projectors in her brand-new performance on death and the afterlife. In a large-scale, installation-based performance that we bring to Belgium together with Europalia, Deneb Martos explores the materiality of gold-coated 35mm film – that mythical, opaque metal which lets no light through but only shines by reflecting it.

Ghent-based artist Mathias Bracke chooses OFFoff to publicly present his hand-painted films for the very first time, accompanied by his own live music. Alongside his own work, he also wants to show the suite that Stan Brakhage made after witnessing the light through the great stained-glass windows of the Chartres Cathedral. ​“It surely transformed my aesthetics more than any other single experience,” concluded the filmmaker who aspired to write poems with light. In turn, Gregory Markopoulos reads in Political Portraits from Paul Valéry’s prose poem Man and the Night: ​“I am all, and incomplete. I am all, and a part. The darkness which surrounds us completely bares our soul.”

Here, you can read our interview with Els van Riel on the occasion of the screening of ELLIPTIC (2025) in collaboration with Courtisane Festival.

Discover our com­ple­te spring pro­gram­, run­ning until May 2025, in our bro­chu­re [PDF], which is also avai­la­ble at various cul­tu­ral venues across Flanders and Brussels!

One day, the cat of philosopher Patricia De Martelaere no longer wanted the kibble she had been so fond of for years. Only a different brand provided solace. The incident inspired the writer, in her essay ​“An Old Desire for Renewal,” to question the artistic ideal of ​‘the new’ and the avant-garde, using nature as a mirror: ​“Every spring, all of nature rejuvenates, only to seemingly wither after the peak of its bloom – yet in fact, it is preparing the soil for a new phase of growth.” We dedicate an evening to Patricia De Martelaere, allowing her ideas to ripple through the new film season.

In L’Ancre, Jen Debauche explores an intimate ecological and mental fragility through breathtaking, analog black-and-white images of the Arctic landscape. In filmmaker Karel Doing’s phytography workshop, participants can create their own prints of flowers and plants on the delicate film emulsion. A triptych on the unique work of Arthur Cantrill and his wife Corinne – a botanist – immerses us in their particular attention to the Australian landscape.

De Martelaere chose the plant ​“Schildersverdriet” (“Painter’s Sorrow”) as the title for the short story that planted the seed for her debut novel The Painter and His Model. The model is not the woman posing, but her previous lover – the painter’s predecessor. On the cover, like a kind of blueprint: Vermeer’s eponymous painting that reveals his own construction, also known as Painter in his Studio. In the film portrait that Dany Deprez made of the painter Matthieu Ronsse, the studio-home breathes the spirit of this artist for whom the old masters are never far away. In turn, our guest of honor Robert Beavers presents a portrait of the woodcarver who, in his childhood, taught him what it means to be an artist – retracing this journey through the very first images he ever shot.

We honor the late British avant-garde pioneer Malcolm Le Grice with After Manet, his rarely shown work with four projectors in which four actors reenact Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. A choreographic questioning of the gaze is also central to the programs Eva van Tongeren and Chloé Op de Beeck each put together around their own new work. Our opening film, The Code, undertakes a similar exploration by integrating memes, DMs, FaceTime, Snapchats, TikToks, and more than seventy digital cameras. A film with the old soul of a classic screwball comedy or romcom that captures, scorns ánd embraces ​‘the young’ and ​‘the now’ like no other. ​“The spring is new and new the sound it brings?”