Courtisane is een platform voor film en audiovisuele kunsten. In de vorm van een jaarlijks festival, filmvertoningen, gesprekken en publicaties onderzoeken we de relaties tussen beeld en wereld, esthetiek en politiek, experiment en engagement.
Courtisane is a platform for film and audiovisual arts. Through a yearly festival, film screenings, talks and publications, we research the relations between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement.
The Courtisane festival opens with a very special premiere: the documentary film Disorient by Brussels artists Florence Aigner & Laurent Van Lancker, will be presented for the first time in a new “expanded” performance version in collaboration with Sébastien Koeppel and Laszlo Umbreit. Before that, a selection of films by “Artists in Focus” Sylvain George and Robert Fenz will give a foretaste of the festival programme.
A polyphony of tales by migrants who return to their homeland after having lived abroad. Whether they are Vietnamese, Iranian, Chinese, Pakistani, academics, political refugees or students, they all are confronted with a second exile: coming home. They also share the capacity to analyse the differences between the cultures they have lived in with humour, critical distance and lived experiences. This experimental documentary moulds this polyphony of tales in a minimalist, impressionistic form. Only a few traces of images, of travelling, of material culture, appear above the voices and soundscapes, just as there remain only shadows and memories of their presence abroad.