The aim behind this brand-new festival PolitiK – International Political Film Meetings is to shine a light on the complexities involved in wielding power, but also on the close relationship which exists between the representation of power and the power of representation. With its line-up of never-before-seen movies and directory films, the main idea is to highlight portraits of figures from the political world as offered up by Belgian and international film.

PolitiK will open with the screening of Belgian filmmaker Stephan Streker’s latest movie The Enemy [+lee también:
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entrevista: Stephan Streker
ficha de la película], which follows the precipitous fall of a Belgian MP accused of murdering his wife and explores the links between the public persona and private life of a political man whom everyone sees as defined by his title.

Another Belgian film is likewise set for the showcase: David Leloup’s rebellious documentary Saint Nicolas est socialiste (which won the Grand Prize in the Brussels International Film Festival’s national competition last year). The movie looks back on the unusual path trodden by Roger Boeckx and Filippo Zito, local councillors for the opposition in Saint-Nicolas - a small town in the region of Liége where the socialist party has enjoyed an absolute majority for more than a century - who are battling for greater transparency in public and political life, a fight not too far removed from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’s windmill-related struggle.

Belgian political life will remain under the spotlight via the screening of the first two episodes of the De Zestien series, which looks behind the scenes of the federal Belgian government’s headquarters at la Rue de la Loi, and which boasts an offbeat tone on a par with Spin City’s or House of Cards.

Another documentary in the offing is La Féministre by Viktor Nordenskiold, which follows Margot Wallström - the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs known for her ardent feminism and sharp and empathic mind - over a period of four years. Indeed, the question of women and power is one of the festival’s key themes and is set to form the focus of a meeting, as well as being central to Italian filmmaker Susanna Nicchiarelli’s movie Miss Marx [+lee también:
crítica
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entrevista: Susanna Nicchiarelli
ficha de la película], which looks back at the road walked by Karl Marx’s youngest daughter Eleanor. One of the first women to link feminism with socialism, she took part in workers’ struggles and in fights for women’s rights and for the abolition of child labour, yet her name has been lost in the annals of history…

All this and more to discover in Liège from 16 to 20 November.