News
06.03.23 Spring 2023
“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 15th 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!
28.10.22 Fall 2022 program
“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!
25.02.22 Spring 2022
“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!
14.06.21 ZOMERSALON 2021: BUY LOCAL #2
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.
08.06.21 Art Cinema OFFoff reopens!
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.
21.04.21 Art Cinema OFFoff is going live again!
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.
28.09.20
With a few resumptions of canceled spring screenings and a number of new programs, OFFoff is totally back again. Get ready for some up-and-coming talent and lots of canonical movies.
You can find up-to-date information and the full program here.
19.02.20
Losing yourself in the other and getting closer to oneself at the same time? It can happen in love, but in film as well, distance can transform in closeness, carefull attention in total surrender. For that reason, in our spring programme, filmmakers surrender to the other, in a broad sense, based on a deeply felt affinity. A new generation of filmmakers – Jasper Rigole, Eva Beazar, Damien Manivel – enter into an intense dialogue with monumental figures – Gustav Deutsch, Mona Hatoum, Marie Menken – from the historical avant-garde.
23.09.19 OFFoff on Mondays
After fifteen years and a multitude of screenings, Art Cinema OFFoff is no longer a newcomer. And yet OFFoff will make its debut this autumn. For the first time, a fully-fledged seasonal programme will be set up in Kunsthal Gent, OFFoff’s new home base. It’s no coincidence that quite a few debut films will be screened. There’s Gabriel by Agnes Martin, Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren, Christmas on Earth by Barbara Rubin and 11 x 14 by James Benning. And that mostly on Mondays. Welcome to the festival!
11.01.19 OFFoff moves!
After fifteen years, OFFoff is leaving the Small Beguinage. In 2019, Kunsthal Gent will become our new home. The ingeniously designed screening space is still under construction, but nevertheless, OFFoff will be present with a broadcast, performances and – of course – films during the big (re)opening weekend of Kunsthal Gent. More news about the farewell to the old cinema and the inauguration of the new one will follow.
08.01.19 A new year, a new site
With our brand new website, it should be clear to everyone what time a screening starts and where it will take place. And even more important: from now on, no one can forget which programs occurred where and when in the past, and what exactly could be picked up. The OFFoff Archive will provide for this in the future. Here, you will not only find an overview of the past programs, but also additional text and images that will make you reflect and remember. No radiant future without a bright past!
