Marthe Peters — Henry is a Girl Who Likes to Sleep

Connection can be found in (un)expected places, for instance in the selection of short films Marthe composed to accompany the Brussels premiere of her own tender film, starring her cat Henry.

I'm not purring, you're purring </3

19:00 (open)
19:30 films
21:00 aftertalk
22:30 (end)

De poes (Johan van der Keuken, 1968, 6')
Disappointed by the cinematic language of his time, Johan van der Keuken starts fiming his cat. This short experimental documentary muses on the need for new means of expression in cinema: ‘Art could be a means by which to emancipate people.’

Here & Elsewhere (Bram Ruiter, 2023, 10')
A romantic film in which water serves as a guiding force for a journey with an unclear destination. Loosely based on Jorge Luis Borges’ poem Arte Poética.
instagram.com/bramruiter

Les animaux vont mieux (Nathan Ghali, 2024, 23')
A mysterious community of animals has chosen to live self-sufficiently in the basement of a church. Sheltered from humans, they engage in various rituals.
instagram.com/nathan_ghali

Original Night (Alasdair Asmussen Doyle, 2026, 29')
Told in two semi-fictional acts, this 16mm film serves as an elegy for Europe’s last wallabies — a marsupial animal from Australia, introduced in Scotland in the 1940s. Reflecting on humanity’s enduring urge to record animals, from prehistoric cave art to early cinema, Alasdair Asmussen Doyle links the extinction of species with the evolution of image-making.

Henry is a Girl Who Likes to Sleep (Marthe Peters, 13')
In a small interior space where bodies constantly yearn for sleep, the filmmaker seeks in her beloved Henry something soft and tender to inhabit, a little fur to retreat into. Between bedsheets and freckles, a love declaration emerges, a fragile collage tracing a pathway between intimacy, vulnerability, and warmth.

about

Marthe Peters is a Dutch filmmaker living in Ghent, Belgium. In 2023 she graduated from KASK, Ghent. Her graduation film Baldilocks premiered at the 74th Berlinale, with screenings at a.o. Courtisane, Karlovy Vary, Seminci Valladolid, Lago Film Fest and the Barbican. From a place of intimacy her work depicts her daily reality in an abstract and fragmented way. Her practice is marked by playing with intuitive material in order to question stereotypical representations of the body. Her films centre around the banal as something important and worthy, in search of solace and care for one another.
instagram.com/mamamamarthe

"In Peters' work, intimacy takes on a radical character, as Sophie K. Rosa describes in her Radical Intimacy (2023), in which the connection with and care for oneself, others and community are seen as sites of struggle to transform the world [...].”
— Bo Alfaro Decreton, about one of Marthe's previous films Kaalkapje, kortfilm.be, 21 February 2024