CONNEXT 2022

Anne is a very strong swimmer who can hold her breath for three minutes and 40 seconds. When she is underwater, she feels happy and in control of her environment. But Anne also has Asperger’s Syndrome, and in everyday life, noise and commotion upset and distract her. She is the subject of Under The Surface, the feature work-in-progress by Guido Verelst, who talks to BDE.

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…

Irène is over 100 and will die one day soon. When that happens, what will become of her daughter Yvette, who is in her 60s and has a mental disability? This is the key question asked by Ellen Pollard’s film, co-directed with Marie De Hert and which is a Work in Progress project at the Antwerp-based CONNEXT platform. Pollard discusses the work with Business Doc Europe.

Documentaries feature very prominently in this year’s hybrid edition of CONNEXT, the annual showcase for features and TV series made in Flanders and Brussels. As far as Flanders Audiovisual Fund Koen Van Bockstal is concerned, that is exactly as it should be. ““In documentaries, you give a voice to authors who can actually give their vision, their interpretation and their concerns about what is happening in the world.”

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.

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.

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.