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!

“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!

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.

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!

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.

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!