A radiant and candid portrait of actress and dancer Souraya Baghdadi.

“I don’t want to be placed in the position of the widow bowing before her partner’s genius. No.” Nicolas Khoury’s film begins with this refusal: Souraya Baghdadi wants to be seen in her own right, rather than solely through her relationship with Lebanese filmmaker Maroun Baghdadi, who died in 1993. From her Paris apartment, Souraya speaks with Khoury, who remains in Lebanon. Between Maroun Baghdadi’s films, their conversations at a distance and Souraya’s almost unreal appearances, the film creates a portrait as free and unpredictable as its subject.

In the presence of Souraya Baghdadi

With CINEMAMED & BAFF – Beirut Art Film Festival

A sensory journey through Japan in the footsteps of the Goze, itinerant blind musicians whose songs brought invisible landscapes to life.

The French Tac-Til choir, made up of sighted and blind singers, travels to Japan to trace the history of the Goze, who travelled across the archipelago for centuries. Their story echoes the choir’s own practice, rooted in listening and sound. Shot almost entirely in black and white on 16mm film, Un chant aveugle blends voices, nature and silence into a deeply sensory cinematic experience.

WITH THE FILMMAKERS

Alain Cavalier’s farewell gesture is driven by a conviction that has always inspired him: to film in order to live, and to live in order to film.

At the age of 94, Alain Cavalier continues the theme that runs through his entire body of work: filming everyday life before it disappears. A conversation, a walk, a meal, a beloved face, a sudden thought… Nothing seems too small to become cinema. Spanning nearly fifteen years of life, Merci d’être venu is a free-form diary in which the days unfold with no logic other than the passage of time. Little by little, the most ordinary moments take on an unexpected depth, whilst absence, old age and death quietly make their way into the picture. Without nostalgia or solemnity, Alain Cavalier has created a moving final film, bidding farewell with grace and infinite gentleness. Thank you, sir!

How far can a passion for Isabelle Adjani take you? A filmed diary by an unusual collector.

For forty years, Cyril Brody has collected everything related to French actress Isabelle Adjani, carefully cutting out magazine covers, interviews and photographs and pasting them into large notebooks. Now on volume 42, he sets out to understand this strange passion. In his white explorer’s suit, he dives into his archives and meets other collectors. But Adjani is only a pretext. His collection becomes a refuge, a protective screen and an indirect way of telling a long-hidden story. Between meticulously organised notebooks and absurd situations, Cyril Brody offers a funny and profound portrait of our secret attachments.

WITH CYRIL BRODY

What if housework became an art form?

In the 1970s, after the birth of her child, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles sees domestic chores consuming her creative work. Refusing to be reduced to daily labour, she turns these alienating tasks into art. From her own home to New York’s Department of Sanitation, where she becomes its first artist-in-residence, Ukeles brings invisible labour into the art world. Through previously unseen archival footage and spectacular actions, including her ballet of garbage trucks, Toby Perl Freilich brings to life a joyful and subversive body of work — and pays tribute to those who keep the world running, largely unnoticed and rarely appreciated.

As the Revolution takes to the streets of Tehran, the artworks preserved in Mohsen and Selma’s home resist in their own way.

Before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, archaeologist Mohsen Moghadam and his French wife, Selma Kouyoumdjian, transformed their Tehran home into a museum, filling it with antiquities, artworks and fragments of vanished civilisations: the tangible traces of a life built together.
Without dialogue, and constructed from thirty years of letters exchanged between them, Ça reste entre nous tells a love story through what it has left behind. Beyond the house, another story unfolds: a country transformed by Revolution and war, slowly reshaping the world they built together.

This screening is organized as part of Become the Sky which is available free of charge until the 5th of December 2026. 

At 4:00 PM, you can join the guided tour of the exhibition with the curator and the artists. 

Free, booking required : accueil@iselp.be

An extraordinary moment of 1970s American counterculture, shot on 16mm and unseen until today.

In New York in 1978, the Nova Convention brought together a constellation of artists around writer William S. Burroughs: Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, Anne Waldman and Philip Glass. Long thought lost, this footage was rediscovered and restored between 2012 and 2024, capturing an explosion of ideas and forms where poetry, music, performance and cinema collide. But Nova ’78 does more than bring a legendary event back to life. Beneath the artistic ferment, the fractures of an era emerge: political fears, threats of repression and the struggles already running through American society.

In a high-security prison in Tuscany, inmates create a baroque and flamboyant theatre.

Since 1988, men serving long sentences in Volterra have rehearsed, read and performed under the direction of Armando Punzo. Born in prison, the Compagnia della Fortezza has become one of Italy’s most singular theatre companies, earning a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. Elsa Amiel takes us into their rehearsal room, onto the stage and on tour, staying close to the collective work of bodies, voices and imagination. Texts are read, repeated and reworked until images emerge. From words, a powerful theatre takes shape, where tragedy surfaces and blood and sweat mingle with light.

WITH THE FILMMAKERS

Between transmission and resistance, Germaine Acogny continues to set bodies in motion while defending the place where she has chosen to pass on her art.

Born in Benin in 1944 and raised in Senegal, Germaine Acogny has spent fifty years shaping African contemporary dance and transforming representations of the Black body on international stages. The film traces her journey from her encounters with Senghor and Béjart to the École des Sables, which she founded in Toubab Dialaw and where she continues to pass on her art to dancers from around the world. Today, the school faces a new threat: the lagoon opposite from it is being torn up for the construction of a vast container port. At over 80, Germaine Acogny is still ready to fight.

A censored performance by Marina Abramović is the starting point for Final Cut, a film about who decides what we are allowed to see.

In 1975, Marina Abramović is filmed for the Dutch arts programme Beeldspraak. Her performance Thomas Lips is deemed too violent and the broadcast is cancelled. Fifty years later, Joeri Pruys, son of the programme’s creator, sets out to find the missing footage. His search leads to contemporary artists who still face censorship and attempts to silence them. From Abramović to Basma al-Sharif and Ahmet Öğüt, Final Cut asks who gets to decide which art can be seen.

WITH THE FILMMAKER