Le Fresnoy

Island of La Réunion, in the beginning of the 20th century. Five teenagers commit a savage crime. As punishment, a Dutch captain takes them to a supernatural island with luxuriant vegetation and bewitching powers.

In the summer of 1979, gay porn producer Anne sets out to film her most ambitious film yet, but her actors are picked off, one by one, by a mysterious killer.

Stranded along a sublime river fjord in northern Portugal, an ornithologist is subjected to a series of brutal and erotic Stations-of-the-Cross-style tests.

André Demester secretly and painfully loves Barbe, his childhood friend, accepting from her the little that she gives him. He leaves home to be a soldier in a war in a far off land. Barbarity, camaraderie and fear turn him into a warrior. As the seasons go by, Barbe, alone and wasting away, waits for the soldiers to return. Will Demester’s boundless love for Barbe save him?

The mood is heated. Demonstrations are taking place across France, also in front of the Paris hotel where an Italian named Giorgio is booking the bridal suite for him and his boyfriend Antonio. Hotel manager Diana doesn’t trust them and calls the police to get rid of the odd couple. Italians? Homosexuals? Criminals? In the charged atmosphere of the Hotel Occidental, little is needed for initial suspicions to be aroused.

Mariel wants to play Isabella in Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure”. With the support of Luciana, who is also an actress, she has already rehearsed the part. But during the audition, Mariel realises that Luciana is trying out for the same role.

Gaspard is still very much in love with Leïla. They meet in a crowded bar a month after she left him. The conversation turns awry and Gaspard seeks refuge under the tablecloth, away from prying eyes and closer to his memories.

A popular sensation in medieval Europe, bestiaries were catalogs of beasts featuring exotic animal illustrations, zoological wisdom, and ancient legends. The documentary unfolds like a filmic picture book where both humans and animals are on display. As we observe them, they also observe us and one another, invoking the Hindu idea of “darshan”: a mutual beholding that initiates a shift in consciousness.

A therapist at a Berlin university navigates delicate emotional terrain as she provides solace to a grieving student grappling with the suicide of a trans woman on campus.

The world is alive, but maybe without mirrors and images, none of it would exist. The blind create images in a different way – with sounds, textures and experiences. When you enter the rabbit hole, imagination plays the main part.

A young woman wandering around meets a young man going to a casting call for a pornographic film.

A home-guard serviceman assigned the task of standing watch over a barren no-man's-land begins to experience an existential crisis after years of lonely service.

Short lo-fi film set in Senegal. Mostly focussing on a group of Senegalese youths, discussing their hopes and fears concerning the crossing of the atlantic to get to Europe. Will life be easier there or not?

Time strung together by recollections, encounters and dreams. A farewell over the three last months of a man before his final transformation.

A man washes up on a beach. He saves a foreign woman and together they flee into nature. There they discover that the beauty of the environment only distracts from the growing threat. Behind the serene greenery hides death and destruction. Where did they end up? The present and past of the country merge imperceptibly into one another. This is a battle of all times, with the landscape as a silent witness.

A hovering, creeping menace sneaks into thoughts, bodies, and glances. Through strange events, anguish spreads and turns into delusions of persecution. The misshapen green mass moves relentlessly forward in silence, its infinite vines haunting minds and the places it covers. In the wake of conspiracy theories, this plant embodies a strange, even alien evil, supposedly there to invade and contaminate.

In 2004 Wim Vandekeybus shot a 52-minute feature based on his successful performance Blush. Carried by the music of David Eugene Edwards and Woven Hand and with texts by the Flemish author Peter Verhelst, Blush is a dazzling voyage swinging between the heavenly landscapes of Corsica and the slummiest depths of Brussels. It is an exploration of the savage subconscious, of mythical forests, of conflicting instincts, of imagination, where the body has reasons unknown to the mind. In dance sequences of attraction, confrontation and repulsion the performers take on animal metamorphoses…

One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean reflects on the experience of not being able to see the world with depth perception. Made up of micro-events from "satisfying video" that swarm on the internet, the abstract narrative unfolds through an appropriation way by referring to trance and minimal music. It's about a desire for groundless waves, blended with today's inexorable entropy of our information societies.

João Pedro Rodrigues answers the question from the title with an autobiographical short-film.