CONNEXT 2022

Aldine Reinink talks to Business Doc Europe about her new film, a profile of renowned Belgian photographer Herman Selleslags, whose vast Antwerp house teems with the ghosts of 20th Century pop culture, as captured by his camera. But the multiplicity of images also conceals two psychologically complex father-son relationships which have defined life in the Selleslags household, the director reveals.

The stereotype of the climate activist is of an Extinction Rebellion-style protester, dressed like an old hippy, holding up the traffic in a busy city centre or blockading the petrol pumps. Roger Cox, the protagonist of Nic Balthazar’s new film Duty Of Care, screening online at CONNEXT 2022, is in a very different mould. The director explains how to Business Doc Europe.

Constructed from home videos from the 1990s and early 2000s, Love Is Not An Orange, which world-premiered in Leipzig, paints a fascinating portrait of the impact independence had on Moldova, formerly part of the Soviet Union, a country that struggled to make the transition from communism to capitalism, and all seen through the prism of family relationships.

An elegant and insightful blend of childlike art, music and observation helps elevate Vida Dena’s documentary My Paper Life (Ma vie en papier) to something rather special, and helps deliver a thoughtful and warm look into the thoughts, memories and present-day realities for a Syrian family who have escaped the war and are now living in Belgium.

The Flemish CONNEXT showcase, running 10-25 October, offers up 26 new and upcoming Flemish and Brussels-initiated documentary features and works-in-progress (both feature projects and series, including VR) which will be presented to the international sales, distribution, finance and festival professionals in attendance both in Antwerp and online.

Producer Hans Everaert of Menuetto Film discusses Manu Riche’s Carbon, a film about the influence of carbon fuel over the last 100 years of history in Europe and the Middle East. The film is based around three trips, to Italy and Iraq, and the third to Ukraine where Riche originally planned to film in coal mines and to talk about wars that have been fought over carbon. But then war intervened for real…

The title says it all on Pieter Van Eecke’s new project. “There is no Plan B. There is no Planet B,” he explained to Business Doc Europe of his film about two teenage kids, Bo and Lina, who take up the fight against climate change. “I think the urgency with which we should act now is incredibly high. And I think it's also my task as a filmmaker.”

Running 10-24 October both online and in-person, CONNEXT, an initiative of Flanders Image, the audiovisual export agency for Flanders and Brussels, will present 26 new and upcoming Flemish and Brussels-initiated documentary features and works-in-progress (both features and series, including VR) to the international sales, distribution, finance and festival professionals in attendance.

It’s still a hugely sensitive and inflammatory subject which few in Belgium dare to talk about. In the summer of 1942, the local police assisted the Nazi forces as they rounded up Jews in raids across Antwerp. These Jews were deported and many died in Hitler’s death camps. The grim episode is the subject of The Last Jewish Summer, a feature documentary which Thom M. Vander Beken is pitching at CONNEXT.

Jazz and Cold War politics are intimately entwined in Flemish director Johan Grimonprez’s latest doc feature, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a work-in-progress at CONNEXT. The film explores the circumstances which led to musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach staging their own protest at the UN against the murder of Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba. The director talks to BDE.