Namur Film Festival to highlight Belgian feature debuts

by Aurore Engelen

20/09/2012 - The 27th Namur International Francophone Film Festival, to be held from September 28 to October 5, has just announced its rich and varied programme. The festival is to screen fiction features, as well as documentaries, short films, and even video clips in its competitive sections or via its retrospectives. It is to feature over 160 films from a great part of the 60 French-speaking territories all over the world.

Films from countries of the South are to make a graceful comeback at the festival, with the selection of two Senegalese films (Alain Gomis’s Today [trailer] discovered in Berlin, and Moussa Touré’s The Pirogue [trailer], selected for Cannes’ Un Certain Regard) and three films from North Africa (Nabil Ayouch’s God’s Horses [trailer, film focus], a film about the young suicide bombers responsible for the Marrakech attacks that was also selected for Un Certain Regard, Algerian director Djamila Sahraoui’s Yema, and Hinde Boujemaa’s It was better tomorrow, a documentary that follows a homeless mother after the Tunisian revolution).

But the Namur Film Festival will also screen 35 Belgian productions and co-productions, including a few great premieres. Two Cannes discoveries will thus be in the programme: David Lambert’s feature debut Beyond the Walls [trailer, film focus] and Amélie van Elmbt’s first film La Tête la première [trailer] (lit. “Head first” - photo). Others Belgian films will come straight from this month’s great film festivals: Tango Libre [trailer, film focus], a film awarded in Venice and now to open the Namur Film Festival, but also Marc-Henri Wajnberg’s Kinshasa Kids [trailer, film focus] and Jonas d’Adesky’s Twa Timoun [trailer, festival scope]. Finally, festival-goers will exclusively discover famous casting director Kadija Leclere’s feature debut Le Sac de Farine (lit. “The bag of flour”), actor and former Belgian television troublemaker Patrick Ridremont’s first film Dead Man Talking, as well as Au nom du fils by the prolific Vincent Lannoo (whose American adventure Little Glory [trailer] is currently out in cinemas).

(Translated from French)