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FESTIVALS Belgium

A perfectly bilingual Be Film Festival

by 

- This holiday season 2012, the Be Film Festival is offering a (sometimes) merry mixture of Flemish and French-language films that marked Belgian cinema this year.

Today, the seventh edition of the Be Film Festival opens in Brussels. Created in 2005, this festival makes the best of the holiday season to offer a retrospective of Belgian films that were released this year. They are Belgian, but not in any specific language, as the festival prides itself in representing two communities and as such has proven its will to mix productions from the north, south, and centre of the country. For five days, about 20 feature films (and about ten shorts) are to be screened, in a review of this year’s releases with, as a bonus, three premieres.

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There will therefore be catch-up screenings for all those who missed Joachim Lafosse’s masterstroke, Our Children [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Joachim Lafosse
film profile
]
, which is now in the race for an Oscar for best film in a foreign language, and those who didn't see Nic Balthazar’s knock-out film on the right to euthanasia, Time of My Life [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
. Belgian cinema, whose humour was quite dark this year, largely found inspiration in true stories, as in the case of Lafosse or Balthazar. In One Night [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, Lucas Belvaux gives his interpretation of Kitty Genovese’s murder, an event that made headlines in the United States in the 1960s. In Little Black Spiders [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, Patrice Toye deals with an occurrence that broadly upset Belgium. During the 1970s in Flanders, an institute secretly welcomed pregnant young girls, who were then made to give birth anonymously, often against their will, in a hospital just the other side of the nearby border.

On a slightly lighter note, the public will again be able to see François Pirot’s Mobile Home [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, a generational comedy about the
art of procrastination that was released this summer, as well as Groenten uit Balen, the portrait of a community of workers on strike. Also expected is an avalanche of fake laughter and awkward smiles at the premiere of Au nom du fils (lit. “In the name of the son”), an anticlerical pamphlet by Vincent Lannoo that forebodes a serious crisis of faith this festive season. 

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(Translated from French)

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