Week 39/2026

This week’s selection is entirely devoted to Belgian cinema, starting with two of its most notable international representatives: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Screened at Cinema RITCS, La promesse (1996) is the brothers’ breakthrough film in which they first established what would later become their signature style. The film marks a shift in their career from politically engaged video documentaries to narrative films that explore the ethical dilemmas faced by people on the margins. Themes of guilt, betrayal and responsibility towards the other are stylistically translated into a reportage-like mise-en-scène that eschews any form of aestheticism. Content and style are similarly intertwined in Le fils (2002), screened the same evening, in which the brothers’ restless camera closely follows a woodwork teacher in his obsession with one of his students.

CINEMATEK is honoring the recently deceased Belgian filmmaker Jean Harlez by screening his film Le chantier des gosses (1970). Entirely self-produced and made with a self-built camera, the film portrays working-class children in Brussels’ Marolles district who defend their playground against the construction of social housing. Not only its subject matter but also its observational style has led it to be regarded as the first Belgian neorealist film. By looking at the city through the eyes of the children who inhabit its streets, Harlez lays bare the tensions that shape post-war Brussels. The children’s playful resistance against the project developers and their cranes makes tangible a larger struggle against the rationalizing logic of urban redevelopment in the 1950s.

CINEMATEK also screens the newly restored version of Portrait du peintre dans son atelier (1985), in which Belgian iconoclast filmmaker Boris Lehman enters the studio of painter Arié Mandelbaum. Through the paintings, tools and objects that surround him, the artist’s solitary universe slowly reveals itself to the camera. Both the filmmaker and the painter will be present during the screening and will engage in a discussion about the film afterwards.