Brussels, its people, and their neighbourhoods

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SHORTS 1
Nettoyer Schaerbeek (Farah Kassem, 2017) 19min
Living in Brussels during high terror alerts, a resident from Schaerbeek notices an unusual happening in front of her window.

Waiting Working Hours (Ben De Raes, 2019) 16min
On a street in Brussels where day labourers are looking for a job, the voices of the workers are mixed with Google Street View images, piecing together a dialogue about labour, economics and life.

Boulevard d'Ypres / Ieperlaan (Sarah Vanagt, 2010) 65min
Sarah Vanagt turned one of the empty stores on the colourful Boulevard d’Ypres in Brussels into a film studio and invited her neighbours – a mix of new inhabitants, asylum-seekers and shopkeepers – to come and tell a story, a contemporary fairy tale offering glimpses of the Tales of One Thousand and One Nights.

Krakeel (Mattijs Driesen, 2017) 20min
In the Brussels Krakeel quarter, where massive council blocks undergo gradual renovation, youngsters Soufian and Yasin are hanging out, reflecting on their life in a city and in an enormous world.

LONG 1
Here (Bas Devos, 2023) 1h24min
Stefan, a Romanian construction worker living in Brussels, is about to move back home when he meets a Belgian-Chinese young woman who’s doing a doctorate on mosses, stopping him in his tracks.

SHORT & LONG
In attesa di una tempesta solare (Evi Cats, 2023) 24min
A lost woman wanders through Brussels, looking for a familiar face. When a mysterious man tells her about a forecasted solar storm, the strange day falls ominously into place.

Kapital Europe (Ben De Raes, 2025) 1h30min
During a hot summer, two migrant workers make their way around Brussels. The metropolis, both unique and generic at once, is haunted by the ghosts of Capital and of Resistance – but who holds the key?

LONG 2
Kosmos (Ruben Desiere, 2014) 61min
Up until November 2013, the Gesù convent in Brussels was home to around 250 people including a number of Roma families from Slovakia. Over the months leading up to their impending eviction, Ruben Desiere worked with longtime and new inhabitants to create a film, loosely based on the book of the same name by the Polish author Witold Gombrowicz.

SHORTS 2
Papagalo, what’s the Time? (Ingel Vaikla, 2022) 7min
At the former Yugoslavian pavilion from the Brussels World Expo (1958), which was moved to Wevelgem and became the Sint-Pauluscollege high school, a group of kids plays old Yugoslavian children’s games, creating a poetic exchange between the modernist architecture and the moving bodies.

Fantasmagoria (Merlijn Beullens, 2025) ??min
Through images from Skopje (Macedonia) and Brussels, Fantasmagoria examines the tensions around the controversial project Skopje 2014, which reshaped the cityscape with neoclassical façades and monumental statues. How do such interventions function as propaganda? And how are they perceived by residents, artists, and architects?

LONG 3
Bains Publics (Kita Bauchet, 2018) 60min
Almost 65 years after their inauguration, the Bains de Bruxelles in the Marolles continue to provide the residents with a relaxing and a health-giving environment for all ages, backgrounds and social classes. An illustration of a melting pot that might seem egalitarian but is in fact much more complex.

SHORTS 3
Floréal (Thierry De Mey, 1985)
Discover the Brussels garden city of Floréal through the lens of a filmmaker who spent his childhood there. A short film that captures the relationship between architecture and residents as pre-modernist architecture comes to life, supported by rhythmic music

Je suis votre voisin (Karine de Villers, Thomas de Thier, 1990)
In a quiet Brussels street, two filmmakers film their neighbours, capturing personal stories and everyday secrets right on their doorsteps. An interesting portrait of their diverse city.

Les cheveux coupés (Emmanuel Marre, 2009)
In different living rooms in Brussels, parents cut their children’s hair. We witness intimate moments between toddlers who resist or completely surrender to the tender ritual and parents who want to succeed in their delicate task.

Les gens du quartier (Jean Harlez, 1955)
An old coco merchant is making his way through the bustling market squares of the Marolles neighborhood with a large beverage dispenser on his back, serving licorice lemonade to locals. A precious document of city life in mid-century Brussels

LONG 4
Magnum Begynasium Bruxellense (Boris Lehman, 1978) 2h15min
A lively chronicle of residents of the Béguinage quarter, composed of thirty chapters imbricated like pieces of a puzzle. The film takes place in the space and the interstices of one day, starting at dawn and ending at night.

SHORTS 4
Les films de la maison emerge from the eyes and hands of the movement La Voix des Sans-Papiers and the two filmmakers Mieriën Coppens and Elie Maissin. They are making a collection of films which, far from simply filming a struggle, draw the outlines of a house - a place to be built together. If one day all these films were to be reassembled, we might finally be able to see this house from the inside. La Voix des Sans-Papiers was born in 2014. Since then, they have occupied around twenty occupations in Brussels.

Carry On (Mieriën Coppens, 2017)
A group of people without valid residence documents is closely observed in this silent film. The absence of sound highlights the contrast between their quiet presence and the intense, often unseen pressures they endure.

Et leurs lettres (Elie Maissin, Mieriën Coppens, 2023)
Hundreds of summons letters arrive at the occupied building of La Voix des Sans Papiers. With care, Kandé and Taslim sort and distribute the letters to the residents, who will later appear in court. In the corridors of the courthouse, the sounds of an occupation echo.

La maison (Elie Maissin, Mieriën Coppens, 2019)
In the house of La Voix des Sans Papiers in Brussels, the members gather in the corridor for a meeting that will last all night. A direct and intimate confrontation with the living environment of undocumented people in Brussels.

LONG 5
Bruxelles-transit (Samy Szlingerbaum, 1980) 1h20min
Spoken in Yiddish, Samy Szlingerbaum’s only full-length film tells his Polish Jewish parents’ story of their arrival in Belgium in 1947 – the attempts to build a home, the struggle to find illicit work and the efforts to integrate into the country of their exile, without papers or any knowledge of the language. Samy was born two years later.