What’s on: The kids’ film festival that appeals to adults
Flanders’ annual film festival dedicated to young people, an opera season highlight and ‘some Bulgarians’ top our agenda this week
JEF festival
Along with the 80 or so films, there are fun events and activities, like video games projected onto pizza dough, a Gruffalo spotter app and a special effects workshop. There’s programming for children from three all the way up to 16. The festival is based in Antwerp and Bruges, but also pops up in Ghent, Kortrijk and Grimbergen. 4-18 February, across Flanders
Pelléas et Mélisande
The late 19th century French composer Claude Debussy completed just one opera in his lifetime, and it happened to be based on a work by Ghent-born writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Still well known as the only Belgian to ever win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Maeterlinck’s symbolist Pelléas et Mélisande uses a love triangle to reveal dangerous silences – where what is left unsaid speaks louder than words.
Following their collaboration on an extraordinary production of Boléro last year, Belgian choreographers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet lead Opera Vlaanderen in this new production of Debussy’s lyrical drama in five acts. With co-operation from Royal Ballet Flanders, Les Théatres de la Ville de Luxembourg, Opéra national du Rhin, Göteborg Opera and the Grand Théâtre de Genéve, this is heating up to be the one to beat this opera season. 2-13 February, Opera Antwerp; 23 February to 4 March, Opera Gent
Some Bulgarians
Bulgaria holds the presidency of the Council of the European Union for the next six months, and Bozar gets in on the act with an installation of six videos, which are free to view in its Horta Hall until the end of June. The Brussels venue commissioned Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov. He chose to interview six of the most creative people in the country, “arguably the poorest and most corrupt of all the 28 European member states,” he says. The interviews with writers, singers, performers and curators, he says, “gave me six more reasons to write this very text from Sofia and not from somewhere in exile”. Until 30 June, Horta Hall, Bozar, Ravensteinstraat 23, Brussels
About the author
Lisa Bradshaw is the editor-in-chief of Flanders Today. She worked as an editor and journalist in her homeland, the United States, before moving to the awesome city of Ghent in 2004. If she’s not in the office, she’s probably at a film festival.
