Festival

This weekend the BEHAVI’ART Festival is organising a series of concerts, dance performances, photography, art, and drawing exhibitions, and live performances by young, Brussels artists at La Tentation! You get to see work by ZEPHYR, Capitaine Plum’, Jonas Halkin, Antoine Assumani, Shayto Badjoko, Cédric De Smedt, Spear, Ruben Voka, Marc R., Benjamin Hendlisz, Seven Freeman, Jimmy Ruf, Gregory Dassesse, Jonathan Du Mortier, Tamar Kasparian, Loris Chiapparo, and Mathilde Vgd. There are live performances by Obetre and Méta Parole, Zephyr and JDK, and Julie Rouanne! Concerts by Stoons, Anja Rabe, Niels D., Dayo, L’Or Du Commun, Julie Rens & Band, Los Opmoc, Saint-James, Lord Janus & Mr Wash! DJ sets by Wolf 33 and SMIMooZ. And loads more... Full details: https://www.facebook.com/events/190689291054971/

(© Nick Fabin)

From the opening lecture by Algerian author Boualem Sansal to the final note from British author Julian Barnes, the international literary Passa Porta Festival is organising a string of extraordinary evenings this week – about peace, the Arab spring, the short story, etc. On Sunday, the festival will open its famous Parcours through the city. Ten of the one hundred invitees have written pieces for AGENDA that reflect on this edition’s theme: imagination.

(Project Nim)

Burning Ice is het jaarlijkse festival van het Kaaitheater, waarin bekeken wordt in welke mate onze aardbol klimatologisch nog steeds naar de kl*ten aan het gaan is, en wat daar artistiek gezien eventueel kan over gezegd of tegenin gebracht worden.

The sixth edition of the Offscreen Film Festival is nearing its end, but rest assured, the festival of all things cult will switch off the lights in style. We have already booked tickets for tonight's Nikkatsu Triple Bill with the self-explanatory titles Gate of Flesh, She Beast Market, and World of Geisha. Mouth-watering stuff, and for once you can take that literally: in the basement of Cinéma Nova they will be serving Japanese dishes for the occasion. Also coming up is the screening of A Colt Is My Passport on Saturday, a 1967 yakuza noir which, according to the organisers, is related to the masterpiece Branded to Kill, a film we discovered earlier at the festival. For Sunday, we already booked a night in Room 237, a documentary about the numerous insane theories that circulate about the horror classic The Shining, with which Offscreen closed its haunted house-programme last year. AGENDA magazine is giving away 5 pairs of tickets for Room 237 (24/3, 8 pm). E-mail “room 237” to win@bdw.be

“Zeg ne kjir oe loat’est / ’k è der gin gedag van,” vraagt ’t Hof Van Commerce in Dommestik en Levrancier. De Ancienne Belgique weet het alvast wel: tijd om een stand van zaken van de Nederlandstalige muziek op te maken en de diversiteit ervan in de kijker te zetten. Wie is hot en wie zal het worden? Met het gloednieuwe {S}taalkaart festival wil de AB taalgebonden genot op de menukaart van de muziek zetten, met een evenwichtige doorsnede van Vlaamse en Nederlandse artiesten die zingen in hun moedertaal.

Zowel het Offscreen Film Festival, Cinematek, boekhandel-galerie Hors-Série als La Crypte Tonique proberen ons dezer dagen warm te maken voor het werk van een stokoude Spanjaard. Wie mag José Larraz dan wel zijn?

L’écrivain algérien Boualem Sansal - Prix du premier roman pour Le Serment des barbares, Grand Prix de la Francophonie pour Le Village de l’Allemand, lauréat en 2011 du Prix de la paix des libraires allemands, entre autres récompenses - sera omniprésent lors des trois premières soirées du festival littéraire Passa Porta. Il l’ouvrira avec un plaidoyer sur le thème de cette édition, l’imagination.

(Branded to Kill)

“A specialist in entertainment films can do anything, even make artistic films. Woohaha! Watching films is a waste of time. Mine or anyone else’s.” I remember my interview with Seijun Suzuki as if it was yesterday. How does he remember Branded to Kill? “I don’t. I have forgotten everything.” You’re either a free spirit or you’re not.

That this year’s Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, or BIFFF for short, would move to the prestigious Centre for Fine Arts, has been known for several months. Now, they have also released the programme of their 31^st edition. Opening the festival, will be the highly anticipated vampire movie Byzantium by the Irish director Neil Jordan (Interview with the Vampire, The Crying Game). The iconoclast of Korean cinema, Chan-wook Park (Old Boy, Lady Vengeance), gets to close the festival with his film noir Stoker, featuring Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska in the leading roles. From 2 to 13 April, the public gets treated to 110 feature films, a retrospective of special guest Neil Jordan’s work, a selection of Universal horror classics at Cinematek, a ZombiFFF Picnic Parade at the Warandepark/parc de Bruxelles, and masterclasses by – again – Neil Jordan and Dario Argento. Info: www.bifff.org

Today, the Offscreen Film Festival is being kicked off. To celebrate, we are giving away five pairs of tickets for the explosive Double D Bill, on Friday 8 March (10 pm) in Cinema Nova. An evening for fans of size double D with the screening of Supervixens, the hilarious, ultra-camp sexploitation classic from 1975 by “the Eisenstein of the nudies” Russ Meyer, followed by Deadly Weapons by the infamous trash filmmaker Doris Wishman, in which Chesty Morgan attacks her enemies with her two greatest talents... If you feel like taking a break to stretch your legs, you can nip down to the basement of Nova for the Divine Night, including a photo studio, make-up artist, and hair contest, and records in bad taste by Caniche Noire and Lounge Bastard, aka Gilles Vranckx, the guy who made our fantastic John Waters cover last week. The dress code – if not totally obvious – is camp and trash. E-mail “supervixens” to win@bdw.be