For members at the Explore category and above, tickets will become available two weeks before the screening date, starting at 10:30 a.m. Additional tickets will be available to members and the general public one week before the screening date, also at 10:30 a.m. Please note that space is extremely limited and tickets will be in high demand.
Here. 2023. Belgium. Written and directed by Bas Devos. With Liyo Gong, Stefan Gota, Teodor Corba. DCP. Courtesy Cinema Guild. In Dutch, French, Romanian and Mandarin; English subtitles. 82 min.
Stefan, a migrant construction worker in Brussels, has been having trouble sleeping in the lead-up to a voyage back home to Romania. He lives a lonely, but not solitary, life, and finds that sharing soup with those he meets helps him to connect to his fellow city-dwellers. But more unexpectedly, this gift-giving connects him to the natural parklands that line the streets of Brussels. As Stefan begins to pay closer attention to his surroundings, he collides with Shuxiu, a bryologist studying mosses, on one of his walking paths. Shuxiu is on her own similarly directed, but entirely unique, trajectory. Here is an extraordinary spectacle of these two souls converging, which touches on cinematic majesty, both Dickensian in ambition and yet so precise as to call to mind the work of scientist and microscopic filmmaker Jean Painlevé. Bas Devos is only 40 years old (and an alumnus of New Directors/New Films with his chilly bildungsroman, Violet), but his films seem wise and omniscient, like the moss-covered Sycamores that his camera dwells upon. Here takes a surprisingly inward, vulnerable turn that radiates warmth and glimmers when held up to the light.