FIFEQ – Villa Madjo + a river holds a perfect memory + Do You Hear the Wind in the Pine Trees? + Gwo Ging [FREE]

Free admission, subject to availability

11 am Audience welcome
11:30 am Screening begins

*Screening followed by a discussion

Villa Madjo

In Villa Madjo, Elen Sylla Grollimund explores her family history through an intimate prism deeply rooted in the legacies of the past. Through images and testimony, the film goes back in time, revealing the complexities of colonialism, exile, and the cultural tensions that shaped her parents’ lives. With a sensitive and poetic approach, Villa Madjo does more than tell a personal story; it touches on a collective memory, questioning family legacies and the invisible lines that link continents, generations and hearts.

Directed by Elen Sylla Grollimund
2023 | 13 min | French (s.t. English)

Featured selections: Award for Best Documentary Film, Blue Danube Film Festival / Mediarte – Graines de Cinéastes Award, Brussels International Women’s Film Festival / Selected at Magritte du Cinéma 2025, Documentary Short Film category

Filmmaker’s country: France, Belgium / Country of filming: France, Ivory Coast

a river holds a perfect memory

Bodies of water are intervened upon, moved, disrupted and exploited. Labouring bodies experience similar pressures from the same forces of power and extraction. Distant communities — Northern England and Jamaica — share similar histories of manipulation and oppression whose record is kept in the living memory of its waterways. But water, like people, can find a way to exert its own will. (IDFA, Cristina Kolozsváry-Kiss)

Directed by Hope Strickland
2025 | 17 min | English (s.t. English)

Featured selections: International Film Festival Rotterdam / New Cinema Awards, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival / Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Hawick)

Filmmaker’s country: United Kingdom / Country of filming: Jamaica

Do You Hear the Wind in the Pine Trees?

In Do You Hear the Wind in the Pine Trees?, Belgian photographer, filmmaker, and mixed media artist Axelle Lenaerts returns to Japan seeking closure after heartbreak. Guided by her friend Kanji, Lenaerts explores the intricacies of the Japanese language—renowned for its ability to capture the subtleties of emotion and nature—mirroring the shifting seasons and their evocative sounds: the crunch of winter frost, the crash of waves on the shore. Weaving together nature’s rhythms, stanza-like thoughts in white ink, and deconstructed Japanese characters, the film becomes a meditative reflection on the meaning of goodbye.

Directed by Axelle Lenaerts
2024 | 39 min | Japanese (s.t. English)

Featured selections: FLIGHT Mostra internazionale del cinema di Genova / Escales Documentaires (La Rochelle, France)

Filmmaker’s country: Belgium / Country of filming: Japan

Gwo Ging

Gwo Ging (meaning “to transit through the border”) is an experiential ethnographic video that explores the geographies of death in Hong Kong. In this saturated archipelago, the dead now “cross the border” in a ritual lasting fifteen minutes and skip the traditional night at what is euphemistically called the “grand hotel” (dai dau zim), that is, the funeral parlour. Following undertakers working behind the scenes of funerals, the film pays attention to the invisible labor of care performed for the dead.

Directed by Marie Lecuyer
2025 | 24 min | Mandarin, English (s.t. English)

Filmmaker’s country: Canada / Country of filming: China