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Non-stop crossover screenings and videolibrary

Experimental sci-fi movies and video, Japanese anime TV serials...

Opening times
- Videolibrary
Thursday to Sunday, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
- Screenings
Sunday, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.

With, among others:

She Puppet, Peggy Ahwesh
USA, 2001, 17 min

Like earlier magical entertainments that generated new notions of the body as a technology, such as late 19th century trick films (magicians transforming women into butterflies, skeletons or angels, etc), Lara Croft is the girl-doll of the late 20th century gaming world. What we like most about her is that she is a collection of cones and cylinders -- not a human at all-- most worthy as a repository for our post-feminist fantasies of adventure, sex and violence without consequence. The limited inventory of her gestures and the militaristic rigor of the game strategies created for her by the programmers, is a repetition compulsion of sorts, offering some kind of cyberagency and cyberprowess for the player. As I played the game, I recorded it live onto tape, collecting hours of footage. Then I re-edited the material as "found footage". Ignoring the original drive of the action, I make Lara a vehicle for my thoughts on what I see as the triad of her personas: the alien, the orphan and the clone. Quotation are from "The Book of Disquiet" by Fernando Pessoa, "The Female Man" by Joanna Russ and jazz mystic Sun Ra.
Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix, New York

Antes de la television
Encuentro con la television,Ximena Cuevas
Mexico,1983 and 1993, 2 x 2 min

“Mexico’s video artist extraordinaire: half magician, half mermaid, master of all she surveys.” This is how Ruby Rich describes this talented Mexican artist. These two early examples of her work can be read as experimental meditations on the encounters of her generation with communication technology. They address the threatening underbelly of rapid technological change in a humorous and self-referential manner, demystifying its promise at the same time as capturing its combination of excitement and fear, promise and threat. As vacuum cleaners and televisions break irredemptively through the thin line separating the private from the public, fear and desire become mingled to such an extreme that frenzy and silence become the only viable alternatives.

Whoosh, Anouk De Clercq
B, 2001, 12 min

Motion pictures, motion graphics, music interplay in this poetic reflection on our accelerated age

Expérience Valins,Didier Demorcy, Isabelle Stengers, Vincianne Despret
B,1999,50 min
The Valins Experiment was conceived with the aim of exploring and elucidating the multiple and confused relationships between body, consciousness, and situations able to produce emotional reactions. It shows that synthetic emotion is no more genuine or false than live emotion.

Manual, Matthias Müller - Christoph Girardet
D, 2002,9'30

Manual combined material filched from US television series of the 60s with the voices of several female protagonists of 40s and 50s Hollywood melodramas. It explored our preconceptions of the future as a technological utopia, while revealing - and celebrating - television's often crude attempts at constructing future worlds and environments. The title, Manual, alludes to growing concerns about the remote organisation and control of our lives by technological means, and to the cultural codes that create conformity and rules in our daily lives.

Phantom, Matthias Muller,
D, 2001, 5 min

Phantom presents a geography of shadows, silhouettes, and anemic figures seen in negative that alludes to secrets lurking between stories.

Serial Experiments Lain, Ryutaro Nakamura
Japan, 13 episodes

There is the world around us, a world of people, tactile sensation, and culture. There is the wired world, inside the computer, of images, personalities, virtual experiences, and a culture all of its own. The day after a classmate commits suicide, Lain, a thirteen year-old girl, discovers how closely the two worlds are linked when she receives an e-mail from the dead girl:
"I just abandoned my body. I still live here..."
Has the line between the real world and the wired world begun to blur?

Blinded by light, Simon Pummel
UK, 2000, 7 min

A blind man receives corneal transplants. He is fourty-six years old. For the first time since he was born he has complete funtional use of his eyes. What does he see? This is the story of a man's struggle to learn to see. A dramatic monologue.

Dandy Dust, Hans Scheirl
Austria, 1998 94min

A split personality cyborg of fluid gender zooms through time to collect h-selves in the fight against a genealogical obsessed super-mother...
Inspired by Hong Kong and Japanese live-action comic-strips, splatter movies, queer underground, feminist and Viennese Aktionism, 'Dandy Dust' is a transgender noize / splatter / scifi / horror / comix feature film.

Minnesota 1943, Toni Serra
Spain, 1995 7 min

In 1943, at the request of the American army, the University of Minnesota implements a psychological test for officer recruitment. The same test is later used internationally to recruit staff for private companies. Relax, try to be sincere.

Peggy and Fred in Hell, Leslie Thornton
USA, 1984-1992
Peggy and Fred are the two survivors of a post-apocalyptic world swamped by cultural detritus on made of found footage:
“There are no other people in the world. Something has happened to them, but Peggy and Fred are unconcerned. And since the only other people they ever see are on TV, they figure that people are watching, learning from, or ignoring them as well. This constitutes their idea of the social.” (Leslie Thornton)


Science Fiction in Flanders (Vlaamse Fictie)
B, 1999
Four films on the science fiction of Flanders

Eenzaam zonder jou (Lonely without you) , Sarah De Bisschop,
Soundtrack: Alain Pierre, 15 min
Flanders, 2004. Lena Stromans is 27. She's handsome, intelligent and single, but not for long. For Lena has a plan that is so secret that it will not be made public before the year 2031. Thanks to the website of love she will be able to to realize her near-perfect utopia. A film about new families, new love and old-fashioned passion.
Ufo’s boven Geel (Ufo’s above Geel) Vincent Patar, Stéphane Aubier & Vincent Tavier,
Soundtrack: Scratchpetland, 12 min.
This is an unbelieveable, yet true story. It's 1962. The students of the Municipal Technical Institute of Geel, a small provincial town are working on an unidentified flying object. Mister de Joncker is a real inventor and the driving force behind this mysterious project. After having conviced the school to invest, he also gets financial backup from the worldfamous Flemish contry 'n' western singer Bobbejaan Schoepen. Almost thirty years later, three Brussels filmmaker search for the secrets behind the UFO of Geel. This is a document on the boundless belief in progress, on yesteryear and the day after tomorrow.
Kijkgedrag (Viewing Behaviour) , Karen Vanderborght
Soundtrack: Thomas Köner, 13 min.
Some time ago an unidentified flying object crashed on belgian territory. During their holiday, completely by accident, some researchers of the SETI-project stumbled upon the wreckage. In the fuselage they found some unidentified footage.
Belgium strikes back, Pieter Van Hees & Erik Bulckens
Soundtrack: Eavesdropper, 10 min
Brussels, 2001. The weather girl gets kidnapped by an extreme nationalist party in order to flood the country with those typical Flemish rain storms. The Belgian people don't like the idea at all, so they call on the Hawaian cyborg-duo Striker Investigations for help. Teaming up with a very good exile friend from Hollywood, our heroes try to succeed in their dangerous rescue operation. Brussels never looked so great than in this lofi scifi blockbuster.