In the context of Courtisane Festival 2026 (Gent, 1 – 5 April 2026).
“For the distance is measured, and that is what matters. By measuring the distance, we come home.”
Border Country (1960) — Raymond Williams
As the old anchors for being tethered to the world seem to become undone and drift ever further away, the question of ‘belonging’ poses itself with a renewed force. What does it mean to belong to a place, to a community, to an affective space? How do we shape and maintain connections when infrastructures of collective existence break down? What could it mean to be-at-home? A persistent narrative of home assumes the possibility of a space which is pure, which is untainted by movement or difference; a place where boundaries are fixed and everything is ‘in place’, such that homes become safe and comfortable. However, the problems with such a model of home as a purified space of belonging are many, not in the least in that it projects strangeness beyond its walls. In such a narrative, movement is always already a movement away from that space which is considered as a beacon for familiarity. As if there is no strangeness and movement within the home itself. Furthermore, if this idea of home invokes visions of belonging, we might also be reminded that belonging participates in the language of possession, of property and propriety, with territorial effects in regard to space and objectifying effects in regard to people. But just because we are in a space together does not mean that we belong to the space, let alone to each other.
Against these stubborn commonplaces of home, many contemporary thinkers and artists have pointed out that home is not always fixed in a single location, and movement does not only happen when one leaves home. Home may involve attachment and movement, fixation and loss, and the transgression and enforcement of boundaries. Also, at odds with the overbearing tendency to privilege movement as the dominant form of social life and individual experience of the contemporary ‘global’ world of ‘flows’ and ‘liquidity’, it has been stressed that forms and conditions of movement — generally conceived as operating between ‘here’ and ‘there’ — are not only highly divergent but also necessarily exist in relation to similarly divergent configurations of being ‘at home’. If the bounds that constitute a home stand for protection for some, they also signify exclusion or oppression for others. While movement is taken for granted by some, it is constrained for others. Who moves, who remains, and under what conditions? What is the relationship between those here and those there? Moreover, where or what is ‘there’? Is it necessarily not ‘here’? When and how long is ‘there’ a significant site of connection? How far away is ‘there’? How does one measure that distance?
Measures of Distance is composed of a modest selection of films and performances that articulate specific experiences of home and world, intimacy and distance, location and dislocation, displacement and entanglement, while also seeking to complexify the distinction between here and there. Works that examine both how movement is experienced in relation to home and belonging, and how home and belonging are formed in relationship to histories of individual and collective movement. Works that challenge the possessive connotations of belonging and rather explore it as a relation whose evidence and terms always need to be contested. A program, in the end, that suggests that home is not a static concept, but an ongoing process. It may entail a labour of love or discontent; it may involve experiences of rootedness or rootlessness, desires for homeland or homecoming; it may be haunted by loss or filled with hope, but the work will always remain incomplete.
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SCREENING 1
Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You
Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
2019, DE / LS / QA, digital, English spoken, 76′
Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese was born and raised in Hlotse, a market town in the landlocked kingdom of Lesotho near the South African border. Today Mosese lives in Berlin, where he’s lived for over a decade. Described by the filmmaker as a ‘lament,’ Mother, I Am Suffocating… explores the complexities of his relationship to his native country. It offers a broader meditation on the legacies of colonialism and Christianity in Africa, and a startling vision of hope for the continent’s rebirth. Addressing a mother figure who embodies the idea of home, the reading of a raw and affecting letter unfolds over an elegiac procession of stark black-and-white images brimming with symbolic resonance and poetic sensibility. The narration shimmers with stolen memories and open wounds, and a sense of inchoate rage and longing, as it shifts from a personal farewell to a profound commentary on identity, memory, displace- ment, and the complex relationship between individual and nation. These are themes Lemohang Mosese has continued to explore in his subsequent films, particularly in his latest, Ancestral Visions of the Future (2025). According to the filmmaker, “the film could be set anywhere, it could be set in Paris just as well as in a village near Beirut. It speaks about people who live on the margins of a society that is new to them, but who do not yet really belong there. It is about people who love and simultaneously despise their homeland.”
“I am a part of Berlin but I know I don’t belong there, I belong to Lesotho and yet I am not a part of it. I am spaceless. I create better from this formless state because I can see better as an outsider. Creating art from this state of mind is rewarding but it has made me a lost person. I wouldn’t have been able to see my country or Africa as a whole if I was inside it. It took me to be an ‘outsider’ to see the tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness of it all.”
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SCREENING 2
Noghteh-e-Goriz (The Vanishing Point)
Bani Khoshnoudi
2025, IR / US / FR, digital, Farsi & English spoken, English subtitles, 104′
After her 2009 film The Silent Majority Speaks — an unflinching portrait of Iran’s Green Movement — was banned, Bani Khoshnoudi was forced into exile. In The Vanishing Point, she breaks a decade-long family silence surrounding the fate of a missing cousin who was executed in Iran’s political prisons during the 1988 purges. Grappling with loss and alienation, she assembles rare surviving objects, fragments, archives, and moving images gathered over years of diary-style filmmaking in Iran to reflect on the pervasive fear that silenced her compatriots for decades, and the growing wave of resistance that continues to build in Iranian society of today, culminating in the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini and the rise of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Through this diaristic film essay, Khoshnoudi turns memory into an act of defiance, confronting the collective generational trauma inflicted by the 1979 Islamic Revolution on countless Iranian families. What does it mean to be erased — not only from your country’s official history, which tolerates no deviation from the norm, but also from the memory of your own family? Through videos of women who never stopped resisting, Khoshnoudi restores a lost family to her cousin. Her forgotten plea becomes part of the collective struggle of Iranian women, an undercurrent in the turbulent sea of rebellion, mapping out an invisible but unbreakable thread between those silenced and a new generation of those who refuse to be. (Dina Pokrajac)
“The Vanishing Point starts from this point of exile – not being able to be physically back in a place that one originates from — and is concerned with fighting for and looking at how state violence has been so repetitive in creating this situation. It’s a personal diary film but it is also talking about people who have historically been fighting against fascism in Iran, as in other countries as well. You either leave or you stay and face the consequences.”
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SCREENING 3
No Data Plan
Miko Revereza
2019, US, digital, English & Tagalog spoken, English subtitles, 70′
Building upon his earlier work, Disintegration, 93-96, a poignant film essay concerning his family’s relocation from Manila to the US, Miko Revereza harnesses the immediate tools at hand — his camera, his smartphone, his itinerant life, and his unique purview as a stranger in a strange land — to construct this evocative meditation on home and homelands. Through static long shots and voice over narrations, Revereza records his physical and psychological journey from Los Angeles to NY aboard a cross-country train. The screen is confined to his point-of-view but this seeming restriction opens up a vast mental canvas for a rapid fire stream-of-consciousness that invite us in as confidantes and co-conspirators while in turn, keep us at a cautionary distance. In the spirit of Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, this alienation effect emulates Revereza’s own as he reviews his own uncanny sense of rootlessness and rootedness as a new American and specifically, a Filipino-American. Over the course of his travelogue, we may question whether this qualifier — that proverbial hyphen — matters in this era of globalisation where we are so connected through screens that national and ethnic identities blur in the disembodied void of the digital? Revereza wants you to decide yourself based on your own experience negotiating both local and global spaces — whether roaring along on the rails, traipsing across airport terminals, or meandering along familiar city streets on foot. Ultimately, his own train of thought crescendos to a near halt when border patrol agents enter the picture and reverie lays waste to grim reality. (Lindy Leong)
Distancing
Miko Revereza
2019, US, digital, English & Tagalog spoken, English subtitles, 10′
After deciding to leave the US and return to the Philippines, Miko Revereza charted his journey on film, creating superimpositions of intimate 16mm images shot in his home, at the airport, and with his family. A coda of sorts to No Data Plan, Distancing uses personal experience to reflect on the lives of displaced persons throughout the western world.
“I never really identified with any places as home no matter how long I’ve lived in that place. When I was in the US, it wasn’t home — I wasn’t a legal resident. So then, on paper, bureaucratically, they didn’t allow me that home. But spiritually, the Philippines didn’t feel like home either. So I don’t know. I feel torn. The concept, the word home, it brings up complex emotions or attachments to it.”
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SCREENING 4
Bouchra
Orian Barki, Meriem Bennani
2025, IT/MA/US, DCP, Arabic, French & English spoken, English subtitles, 83′
Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki are a collaborative artist duo known for their innovative animated films, particularly the viral COVID-19 series 2 Lizards, blending documentary, animation, and digital culture to explore questions of identity, society, and connection. Their feature debut, Bouchra, builds upon their unique blend to explore the relationship between a queer Moroccan Coyote and her mother. The project began as a fictional story about a Moroccan mother and daughter separated by distance and sexual orientation, loosely inspired by Bennani’s experiences. The filmmakers had written an iteration, even recorded the voices and began animating before deciding that “something was missing.” Then Bennani began recording real conversations with her mother, initially as research. The recordings turned out to be better than anything they had written. With her mother’s permission, she used them as the film’s spine, re-creating the dialogue through animation. Blending live-action, photogrammetry and 3D scanning, the finished film moves between Casablanca, Rabat and New York, as well as between fiction and autobiography. It is a portrait of love, communication, and of the gaps that open when language crosses oceans.
“I guess you could say that one of my strategies to avoid exoticising my subjects, is to not care about this directly. I think this is an issue that only comes up if it is self-conscious. Self-consciousness is always in relation to something; trying to understand where you position yourself. In this case, it would be in relation to the West, or in relation to Morocco. At this point, I think that every artist who comes from somewhere and works elsewhere, is in a constant identity crisis. I’ve had it forever and I’m used to it now, but I think it’s paralyzing to always make work from that crisis. It’s always going to be there anyway.” (MB)
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SCREENING 5
Marinheiro das Montanhas (Mariner of the Mountains)
Karim Aïnouz
2021, FR / BR / DE / DZ, digital, various languages, English subtitles, 95′
January 2019. From Marseille, Karim Aïnouz decides to cross the Mediterranean by boat to undertake his first trip to Algeria, in the footsteps of his father and his past. Accompanied by his camera and the memory of his mother Iracema, who died in 2015, he revisits the relationship and separation of his parents, which he documents through a detailed account of his itinerary, from his arrival in the country to his return to Europe, via the Atlas Mountains. During this journey, the director is confronted with the first demonstrations of the Hirak for a change of regime in the country, which will later lead to the fall of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. From this day of protest, he will create Nardjes A., a documentary filmed on the spot with an iPhone, which captures the spirit of a youth determined to build a better future and questions its links with the independence struggles of previous generations. Intertwining present, past and future in Marinheiro das Montanhas (Mariner of the Mountains), Karim Aïnouz reflects on the Algerian war of independence, his childhood memories and the contrasts between his father’s Kabylia and Fortaleza, the hometown of the filmmaker and his mother. An incredible journey through space and time, in which the filmmaker invites us to witness the ups and downs of his personal journey through an unusual prism: the strong link between Algeria and Brazil, two countries “of love, revolution and failure”, according to Karim Aïnouz. (Eugénie Malinjod)
“For over 50 years I have lived in-between, in the interstice, experiencing the constant indeterminacy of belonging and not belonging. Being Brazilian by provenance and matrilineage, being Algerian by name and happenstance I have always lived somehow in the inter- val of culture, neither here nor there, but in some sense everywhere… This film bridges multiple cultures, all of which are part of me and in some significant sense also alien to me. It reaches outwards while simultaneously looking inwards, making connections that have long existed even if they’ve also long been obscured.”
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SCREENING 6
Measures of Distance
Mona Hatoum
1988, UK, video, various languages, 16′
Mona Hatoum was born to Palestinian parents living in exile in Beirut. On a visit to London in 1975, she was prevented from returning to Lebanon due to the outbreak of civil war. One of her earliest works, Measures of Distance is an uncharacteristically autobiographical piece for which she “made a conscious decision to delve into the personal”. The video work is constructed from images of her mother in the shower of the family home in Beirut. The Arabic writing overlaying these images like a curtain or veil represents her mother’s letters from Beirut to the artist in London. The soundtrack consists of an animated conversation between Hatoum and her mother overlaid with Hatoum’s voice reading an English translation of the letters. For Hatoum, as much as the work portrays the emotional intimacy of the relationship between mother and daughter, “it also speaks of exile, displacement, disorientation and a tremendous sense of loss as a result of the separation caused by war.”
Fatima’s Letter
Alia Syed
1992, UK, 16mm, various languages, 20′
A woman remembers her past by faces she sees while travelling on the Underground in London. She begins to believe that these people, like her, have all taken part in the same event which took place in the family home in Pakistan. The story takes the form of a letter to her friend Fatima. A personal documentary around journeys, memories and watching, watching while journeying and remembering while watching — travelling through memories, places and events and documenting them into consciousness. The story is spoken in Urdu and although there are English subtitles, they do not always appear in conjunction with what is spoken, producing a layered, ephemeral, and fragmented experience. Alia Syed, born in Swansea to a Welsh mother and an Indian father, expresses the dislocation of the diasporic experience while questioning the role of language in structuring power relations between class, race and gender.
Seeing Is Believing
Shauna Beharry
1991, CA, video, English spoken, 7′
Shauna Beharry is a third-generation Canadian of Indian descent whose work focuses on the loss of language and of cultural reference that happens with displacement. Seeing Is Believing was her first work in a mechanically reproducible medium. The video expresses Beharry’s frustration over her inability to express in this medium, for, paradoxically, she is using video to show the limits of vision. It begins with Beharry’s camera searching a still photograph over and over. The photograph is of Beharry, wearing the sari. Her voice on the soundtrack is describing the anger and bafflement she felt when, after her mother died, she could not recognise her in photographs. Only when she put on her mother’s sari, Beharry says, did she feel that she had “climbed into her skin.” The feel of the fabric awakens for Beharry a flood of memories that were lost in the family’s movement from India to Europe to Canada. (Laura U. Marks)
Van Mond tot Oor (From Mouth to Ear)
Zita Bamurange Van Bellingen
2025, BE, digital, various languages, English subtitles, 17′
The point of departure of From Mouth to Ear can be traced back to a question: a young filmmaker’s request to her father to use his biological mother’s surname. A question that led to a profound reflection on what it means to be unable to speak the language of your ancestors, and which words in that language might be of help to feel and name what for a long time seemed unspeakable. According to Zita Bamurange Van Bellingen, it felt like searching for a voice that is no longer fully there, for stories and a history that can no longer be passed on. During this process, she discovered that this feeling of loss is shared by many. In her own search for sounds, rhythms, and words, she found connection, and that connection found expression in a film. A film in which language is explored as a bridge between one place and another, but also between past and present, with an eye to the future.
Maman,
Niko Wei
2025, BE, digital, French spoken, English subtitles, 15′
Maman, originated from a filmmaker’s attempt to tell his mother’s story — her move from her hometown of Likasi to Brussels at the age of seven, her longing for the sunsets of her childhood, her decision not to speak for a year, and her dream of becoming a photographer. The film ultimately took the form of a letter from a son to his mother, built around her voice reading the letter for the first time. For Niko Wei, the film grew out of the realisation that he didn’t so much want to capture her story as her voice. And that the film would serve as the fulfilment of a longstanding dream: that of a photographer whose very first image would be a portrait of his mother, champ contre champ with the image of a sunset evoking the indescribable feeling of loss and distance.
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PERFORMANCES
What Lingers When It’s Gone
Lieve Kleeven
2025, BE, performance, English subtitles, 25′
“In a small house somewhere in Flanders, my mother and I sit together at the kitchen table. We eat Bubur, a simple but typical Indonesian dish. What starts as an ordinary moment turns into an intimate conversation full of memories. She tells stories about her childhood in Indonesia and about the generations that preceded her. These words form the core of my work. They form a bridge between the past and the present, between here and there. By listening to her stories, I realize how important it is to pass them on. Not only to make them tangible for others, but also to better understand my own Dutch-Indonesian roots. What remains? What disappears?”
In What Lingers When It’s Gone, Lieve Kleeven unites film and live performance. Her vocals blend with traditional Indonesian sounds and her mother’s compelling narratives. A reflection on what continues to resonate, if only we take the time to listen.
FOLDS
Miko Revereza
2026, performance, 26′
“It’s complicated to call any place home. Mexico is a place that’s not my home as it is for other people who have lived here for generations. Every place where I live, it’s hard to connect to as home, like the US and the Philippines, but I also feel like there’s so much weight to the word ‘home’, and it doesn’t need to be such a priority.”
Miko Revereza is a filmmaker born in Manila, The Philippines, and currently living in Oaxaca, Mexico. His upbringing as an undocumented immigrant and current exile from the United States informs his relationship towards moving images. FOLDS is a silent film poem composed of a series of superimpositions/double exposures. Like a folded map, distances are collapsed and face each other. Through the act of superimposing years of footage of portraits of people and places, the separation between borders here become dissolved.
KMRU
2026, performance, 50′
Joseph Kamaru, better known as KMRU, is a Nairobi-born sound artist and producer currently based in Berlin. For KMRU, sound serves as a sensorial medium through which he explores political, material, and conceptual dimensions. Drawing from a rich repository of listening experiences in Nairobi and beyond, he expands his sonic practice to heighten awareness of his surroundings through creative compositions, installations, and performances. He has collaborated with Niamké Désiré aka Aho Ssan, Freya Edmondes aka Elvin Brandhi, and Kevin Martin aka The Bug, amongst others, and has released his work on prestigious labels such as Mego, Touch and Subtext. Alongside this, he honours his grandfather and namesake, Joseph Kamaru — the celebrated Kenyan activist and Benga musician — by reissuing his music and continuing his legacy of sonic storytelling.
“Different places have identifiable sonic identities relating to their specific locations and the auditory culture of the place. We are influenced by the environments we live in, but mostly not aware of them. This became apparent to me when I first traveled to Berlin and realised how different its sonic identity is from Nairobi. Sounds communicate the different senses and properties of the respective cities: Berlin has more motor sounds, while Nairobi has more sounds of people. We experience these sounds on a daily basis and it is important that we know how they affect us. If they change, they might indicate that something is different, and if we are attentive, we will notice it.”
