If you favour the factual, your path lies towards Leuven in the south, where the Docville international documentary festival runs from April 29 to May 7. But if you prefer fiction, head north to Turnhout and the Opendoek festival of world cinema, which runs from April 29 to May 8.
Tactical thinkers will note that Opendoek has a documentary strand, which allows visitors to catch some of Docville's highlights. This includes Grande Hotel by Flemish director Lotte Stoops, an engaging portrait of a colonial-era hotel in Mozambique that went from 120 rooms of luxury in the 1950s to a ruin inhabited by 2,600 people in the present. There is also Stand van de sterren (Position Among the Stars), a portrait of an Indonesian family that picked up prizes recently at both Sundance and the Amsterdam documentary festival.
And yet despite these overlaps, look at all the fine documentaries that you will miss if you go to Turnhout. There's Inside Job, which won the best documentary Oscar this year for its investigation of the banking crisis, and Waste Land, an Oscar-nominated film about artist Vik Muniz creating portraits of waste pickers from the materials they salvage from the vast tips of Rio di Janeiro. Docville also has famous documentaries, such as pioneering 3D films Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog and Pina by Wim Wenders, one about prehistoric cave paintings, the other about contemporary dance.
Then there are infamous documentaries such I'm Still Here, which recounts the apparent nervous breakdown of actor Joachim Phoenix, and Catfish, about an eight-year-old girl who befriends a New York photographer online.
There also are some very special Flemish documentaries, such Blue Meridian by Sofie Benoot. This takes a journey down the Mississippi to the sea, contrasting the natural beauty of the river with the hardship of communities emptied by economic migration and natural disasters.
But wait, surely there is more to life than documentaries?
At Opendoek you can at least have a laugh, thanks to films such as Almanya - Wilkommen in Deutschland, a comedy about three generations of an immigrant family trying to untangle their ideas about Germany and Turkey (pictured above), or Abel, in which a little Mexican boy decides that, in his father's absence, he is now the head of the family.
On top of that, there are films with a spiritual side, such as Thai folm Eternity, which explores love, memory and the thin line between this world and the next, and personal dramas such as the excellent opening film Nader and Simin - A Separation, about an Iranian divorce that shifts slowly into a tale of crime and punishment.
Opendoek also gives you a chance to immerse yourself in the rich cinema of Argentina, thanks to a retrospective of work by Pablo Trapero, one of the country's leading directors, and films such as La Mirada invisibile, which turns a high-school into a microcosm of the country's military dictatorship. Then there's a selection of vintage Argentine genre films, chosen by the slightly twisted people behind Brussels' Offscreen film festival.
If you are still having trouble deciding, there is always the language question. Most of the Opendoek films are subtitled in Dutch, while at Docville English tends to be the language of choice.
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