Wishful Filming
Spanish premiere.
Introduction and Q&A with Sarah Vanagt (filmmaker) and Inés Calero (film programmer).
Sarah Vanagt travels around Brussels with a camera and finds workers hiding notes for future generations among cobblestones, bricks, and pipes. As she films these messages being left, she wonders, “could I be standing on a builder’s wish right now?”
Wishful filming is a performative game in which workers in the city of Brussels put their best wishes into letters, like someone throwing a message in a bottle into the sea. Only instead of the sea, those longings are held by cement —tucked among bricks, cobblestones, and pipes— waiting for someone to read them someday. Vanagt's gaze is not innocent towards the city she shows us. Recalling the colonial past with the figure of King Leopold II, she moves away from the aseptic European nerve centre to, with a very small camera, focus on the migrant working class. In her wanderings, the filmmaker brings into dialogue notes from the past and future with messages that the streets shout at us: “Free Palestine”, “Growth kills”, “Smash the patriarchy”. The Belgian filmmaker has crafted an agile, fragile, and tender film in which Brussels is revealed as a city full of wishes. A defiant and political gesture that radiates hope and invites us to imagine and search — after all, the wishes of a builder could just happen to be hidden within the walls of whatever place you find yourself at.
Inés Calero
In the same program
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