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?”

Discover our com­ple­te fall pro­gram­, run­ning until December 2024, in our brochure [PDF], which is also available at various cultural venues across Flanders and Brussels!

Under the banner of Fantasma, our fall program is haunted by optical delusions, deceptive perceptions and hallucinations. ​“Your Eyes are Spectral Machines,” titles the season opener. In Hexham Heads, Chloë Delanghe and Mattijs Driesen similarly explore ​“the spectral nature of photography,” drawing on the theory that stones and minerals can record and replay the energy of hauntings. A mysterious photochemical phenomenon also plagues Arrebato, another self-reflexive, experimental horror film in which a character coins the term ​“hallucinema.” For the making of Deep Sleep, Basma al-Sharif practiced self-hypnosis and used the Super8 camera only while in a state of trance. It’s an explicit, more political continuation of the flicker film tradition to which we’re dedicating a separate evening. And although all films flicker between light and dark, these works are the only ones that can reveal what we otherwise cannot perceive.

This is one of two programs created by Atelier OFFoff. From this season onwards, this former workspace is being given new life by three young programmers: Anthony Brynaert, Asel Bakchakova and Raouf Moussa. This fall, Atelier OFFoff also offers space to a filmmaker-in-residence, Victor Van Rossem, who is working on an analog Time-Slice device with 3D-printed cameras.

In addition to a separate experimental 3D program, we present Twittering Soul in which the sculptor Deimantas Narkevičius explores the spatial image with stereoscopic lenses and through folk tales and visions. Luc Peire’s ​‘optical art’ literally plays out the three dimensions, but also cinematically his Environment full of mirrors creates the illusion of an infinite tunnel. Benjamin Deboosere in turn confronts the ​“deceit­ful fairy tale” of Robinson Crusoe that ​“enchanted as a kid but disquiets as an adult.” Where, in the program around Eva van Tongeren’s new film, women are at work in front of and behind the camera, all directly questioning the instrument, Kazuo Hara simply shatters the wall entirely in his hyper-personal and most intimate documentary. ​“In reality, we can only tell one story: our own,” Daniel Robberechts knew. In the writer’s portrait that Jef Cornelis made of him, he concludes that ​“the world cannot be grasped, but continues to haunt in the background.” He spent a lifetime trying to ​“get out of that damned story, that framework embedded in books and our brains, limiting our perception.”

Discover our com­ple­te spring pro­gram­ run­ning until May 2024 in our fol­der [PDF], which can also be found at various cul­tu­ral venues!

“St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around. Something is lost and it cannot be found.” In her new film, Annelein Pompe goes in search of an untraceable woman. On her wanderings, she calls upon the patron saint of lost things and missing persons. Our opening film is the starting point of a spring program dedicated to getting lost, searching and finding something else.

Mathieu Hendrickx and George van Dam explore the visual translation of a score. Bach’s Goldberg Variations are sometimes compared to a travel book, recounting wanderings from one place to another. When we hear the aria a second time at the end of the cycle, it sounds and feels different, despite the fact that the notes are exactly the same and even the manner of playing does not necessarily change. The composer and filmmaker Phill Niblock (1933−2024), who found a second home in Ghent, stated: ​“My music leads nowhere. This is it.” Yet his minimalist pieces open up new panoramas layer by layer. Listening becomes hiking, moving your hearing around the environment. OFFoff sets up a tour along four key locations in Ghent and will highlight Niblock’s film work. The young programmer and filmmaker Raouf Moussa presents an ambitious three-part program around cinematic approaches to space. This concludes a film season in which May marks the fifth anniversary of our new home in Kunsthal Gent and the inauguration of our cinema back then with La Région centrale, Michael Snow’s ultimate film about losing oneself in a landscape.

Forgotten films resurface. Godart Bakkers found the extraordinary artist films of the Ghent film club Studio E. There is a focus on work from the Netherlands that too rarely finds its way to our screens. We invite the Dutch experimental film pioneer Barbara Meter to Ghent and Antwerp. Joost Rekveld made images with analog radio and radar signals for his abstract science fiction film #59. An eyewitness account of still unknown territories? He himself speaks of ​“visual music for the eye,” while Charo Calvo introduces us to ​“cinema for the ear” this season. When people used to explore the edges of a radio frequency, they encountered a strange glissando sound called the ​‘Mexican dog’. It inspired Dany Deprez for the title of his new, long-awaited expanded film. Frans van de Staak – a last Dutchman on the program, celebrated by Johan van der Keuken and Jean-Marie Straub – constructed his film Wind Shadow around scenes in which an actor or actress arrives or leaves. The man and woman pack and unpack suitcases, constantly entering or leaving different dwellings. Offscreen, the poet Gerrit Kouwenaar repeats the verses from Aire, a title that evokes a tune and drops us in the middle of nowhere, a rest stop along southern highways: stepping out, the story / stuck in a comma: wind shadow, selah, blank / line between arrival and departure / the trampled letter on the path a leaf / between leaves, neither echo nor ear, no word / that refers, not even a fence in front / betrays that later, how it unravels – [uitstappend loopt het verhaal / vast in een komma: windschaduw, sela, wit / regel tussen aankomst en weggaan / de betrapte brief op het pad een blad / tussen bladeren, echo noch oor, geen woord / dat verwijst, zelfs geen hek ergens voor / verraadt dat het later, hoe het ontknoopt]

Discover our complete fall pro­gram­ run­ning until December 2023 in our fol­der [PDF], which can also be found at various cul­tu­ral venues!

With this glittery, foil-printed brochure, we present our fall program with a golden touch. Especially for our twentieth anniversary, two former artistic directors of OFFoff are resurfacing in the program. At the same time we are giving chances to new programmers such as the young art historian Anthony Brynaert. Long-time OFFoff luminary, Sofie Verdoodt, is making a once-only comeback as co-curator of the festive anniversary edition of our Night of the Experimental Film. Together with Godart Bakkers, who after Sofie was the face of OFFoff for many years, we bring a very last program in Club Solo in Breda: a collaboration that started in 2015 and ends with an — if we may say so ourselves — impressive one-day film festival. We’re also bringing two programs that Godart organized with Monokino during SHHH in Ostend: thanks to OFFoff, the Ghent artist Jasper Rigole and art historian Steven Jacobs will present their film (program) in their own hometown too. These will already be two evenings with live music, which is the case for more than half of the thirteen programs this season! And who knows, maybe even for our secret screening at Film Fest Gent…

From violin, harp and trumpet to guitars and electronic music. ​“It’s about getting in tune, literally, tuning the material and yourself, as you would with an instrument,” Hannes Verhoustraete says of his new essay film Broken View. Searching for ways to bring the static, glass-made images of the historical magic lantern into motion proved to be at the same time a personal and continuous movement between the past and the immediacy of the present. Kinetic artist and filmmaker Robert Breer kicks off this fall program. ​“I’m interested in everything that moves, whether it is figurative or not,” he stated. Floris Vanhoof will re-animate 750-million-year-old fossils, while José Antonio Sistiaga and Rainer Kohlberger, who passed away this summer, explore the optical power of color in constant motion. One through a life’s work of hand-painted 35mm pellicle and the other through algorithm‑, AI- and machine learning-generated images with homemade software. A week after this color storm, we move to the pure black of João César Monteiro’s Snow White, but even then we watch 75 minutes of dancing film grain.

From now on, you will experience all of this spectacle without fidgeting on your seat. This season, our cinema benches are getting soft, personalized and handmade upholstery from local sheep’s wool. Come to the very first sitting with a customized film program. Just before going into print, the news that the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) will increase their support of OFFoff for the next three years gave our anniversary some extra sparkle! Get moving!

“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!