EXPRMNTL Nights

EXPRMNTL Nights was a three-part film screening programme, which looked at the history of EXPRMNTL, the first international experimental film festival to emerge after the Second World War and a legend in the history of postwar experimental film. Began in Brussels in 1947 as a part of the Festival Mondial du Film, and later staged in Knokke on the Belgian coast as its own alternative festival space, EXPRMNTL brought together filmmakers from around the world during some of the hottest years of the Cold War period.

In EXPRMNTL Nights, Hoetger examined the tensions between domestic production and international visibility in the Belgian context, looking at the political stakes of the festival inside the country, as well as its geopolitical position outside of it, in the emergent landscape of Western European liberal democracies. Night one featured the eponymously titled documentary by Belgian filmmaker Brecht Debackere. Nights two and three included curated programs focused respectively on international films at the festival and Belgian films at the festival, including titles such as: Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1958); Stan Brakhage’s Reflections on Black (1958); Takahiko Imura’s Onan (1963); Roland Lethem’s La ballade des amants maudits (1967); Robbe de Hert’s A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to Golgotha (1967); Jean-Marie Buchet’s Potemkine 3 (1974). The closing night of the program was followed by a post-screening discussion between Hoetger and Belgian filmmakers Jean-Marie Buchet and Roland Lethem.