A new season, a brand-new brochure format! From now on with more space for text and images. A season with an exhibition and a new edition of the Night of the Experimental Film – two highlights of an autumn in which collaboration and interplay return as a common thread. Atelier OFFoff – the open collective within the cinema – takes further flight: building on their exhibition of a work-in-progress by Magali Coremans, they present a parallel program to foster a permanent space for exchange, interaction and encounter around experimental film.

The Night of the Experimental Film – coming to Antwerp for the first time – once again promises a mix of 16mm multi-projection, live music and film performances. At its heart lies the restaging of two monumental works: Vensters, the audiovisual play by composer Lucien Goethals on a text by poet Jan van der Hoeven, and Shelter 9999, a unique collaboration between American composer Alvin Lucier and Japanese filmmaker Takahiko Iimura. Another piece by Iimura will be projected directly onto a bare back: in Iro (Colours), paint, oil, and wax merge to form new colours. Meanwhile, an ambitious and adventurous program by Austrian filmmaker Viktoria Schmid explores the color separation process, where each color is recorded separately. Werner Nekes, too, takes landscapes apart and reassembles them through filmic means, letting individual frames collide or merge. What happens when things are pulled apart, explode or implode, is precisely what is at stake in our opening program. With Crossroads, the magnum opus of collage artist Bruce Conner, we’re off to a spectacular start.

Starting this season, we’ll be missing one of our key anchors, as our regular projectionist Bob Mees heads abroad for a year. On October 5, we celebrate his unwa­ve­ring dedi­ca­ti­on to OFFoff by letting him decide the order in which that evening’s film will be projected. More than ever, this season spans a wide range of formats: from 4K, through 8mm film and even 35mm slides, to a sleazy VHS night with Andy Warhol’s Bad – a collaboration with Herbert Foundation, one of our many new partners this autumn, alongside Ontsteking, Film-Plateau and Children’s Art Day. Next to the numerous international guests, we’re especially looking forward to welcoming homegrown young talent. In Brutalités amoureuses, Louis Gahide directly intervenes on a 1970s sexploitation film, creating a deliberate dissonance with the original material. He will present the reworked 35mm print for the first time at OFFoff, accompanied by a program of found footage and scratch films.

Collaboration turns into mysterious conspiracy in two experimental thrillers on the program: Chronovisor, one of the most striking feature debuts of the year, and Saul Bass’s iconic Phase IV (1974), about group behaviour, observing one another and recognising patterns. Rebound, our program with avant-garde basketball films, looks with equal fascination at the performative aspects of this team sport, while in his new film, Ted Fendt offers an affectionate portrait of a Berlin reading group, whose members are each searching for the storylines of their own lives. A season finale in style, in the Belvedère of the Book Tower. And so, to borrow the poetic line that will soon resound in the audiovisual play Vensters:

Hasten to your eyes / double your ears / and share all hands, for everything approaches in words

Discover the new Atelier OFFoff page, announcing its autumn events and an open call for a writing program (deadline: 19 September).

Events

• Sunday 4 October, 19:30 – RSVP
  Practice sharing with Magali Coremans
  
  Building on the work-in-progress she is presenting at the Oud Huis in Kunsthal Gent across three weekends, at the invitation of Atelier OFFoff (25 September — 11 October)

• Sunday 1 November, 19:30 – RSVP
  Open Screening
  Upload your work

• Sunday 22 November, 11:00 – RSVP
  Peer-to-peer session
  Upload your work

Open call

• Running alongside and through this series of events is a writing program, guided by author and editor Hanna De Grave Loyson. Over the course of eight sessions, a physical publication will take shape in collaboration with Copyshop – .
  
  PARTICIPATION is free of charge and open to a maximum of six participants who are willing to attend all sessions. Application deadline: 19 September

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Today, we said farewell to and celebrated the life of Diederick Nuyttens. Diederick was one of the people who helped shape Art Cinema OFFoff from the very beginning. Whether handling the bar or all-round production, or through his own artistic practice and big heart for young creators, he always embraced experimentation and crossovers between film, music, visual art and, preferably, a good party. He was closely involved in initiatives such as Young Vagrants, De Solist and Experimental Kids. Through his work at Museum Dr. Guislain, he continued to build bridges to OFFoff. We are grateful to him for the many years and shared moments. Our thoughts are with Karen, his family and friends.

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.