Movies: Olivier Smolders

A young teacher is the victim of a cruel joke. When she enters the classroom, all her pupils are naked, standing near their bench. Their clothes are heaped up on the podium...

Based on the real life story of Sagawa, a Japanese student who killed, dismembered and ate a young Dutch girl in Paris....

The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smo...

Some footage and shots of expressionless actresses seen in Ravissements are repurposed in La philosophie dans le boudoir / Philosophy in the Boudoir (1991), wherein Smolders takes extracts from the Marquis De Sade’s nutbar text and applies them to sc...

A cinematographic “cadavre exquis”, whose entrails reveal the odd nature of a (un)certain Belgian cinema. Authors, directors, actors who have proved that imposture could be an act of creation. Convinced that any so-called “new” cinematographic produc...

A small, empty boudoir slowly becomes populated by a series of young women, their still and open expressions gradually engulfing the screen, as a nun narrates an account of religious rapture. Belgian filmmaker Olivier Smolders continues a brilliant e...

A bereft filmmaker asks a series of women to pose nude for his camera in this striking and moody short film by Belgium's Olivier Smolders. The silent encounters act as counterpoint to a contemplative internal monologue musing on love, loss and the su...

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In a world overtaken by eternal darkness, the buttoned down entomologist abandons his phantoms to embrace the unknown....

L’art d’aimer / The Art of Loving (1985), another colour short, is probably the weakest of the ten films, mostly because it’s a blurry monologue (read by Smolders) from the perspective of a man confused about past events from his youth, and the fate ...

In this short film, Smolders theorizes about the effect of the gaze of strangers on the viewer, particularly in terms of what happens to these models after they have been captured by the image, by the camera....

Modest meditation on youth, life and mortality made up almost entirely from professionally made family films. What is more heart-rending than seeing pictures of people who have died? The aim of Mort à Vignole is to transcend the pain of a certain fam...

Mental anguish is all that's present in the film Seuls / Alone (1989). Shot like a grungy medical documentary, Smolders and co-director Thierry Knauff intercut shots of several children at a Belgium psychiatric clinic. The kids are shown with forlor...

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The camera slowly pans through a room as Smolders offers various observations and memories....

The title (NOVENA in English) refers to the nine days of prayers undertaken in Roman Catholicism as an act of devotion or penitence with the aim of obtaining a state of grace. In Olivier Smolders' brooding, impressively refined short film, realized i...

La part de l’ombre recovers the life of the Hungarian photographer Oskar Benedek, who disappeared the day his exhibition opened; what happened to him? - IndieLisboa...

Collector of cursed musicians, unreasonable assassins, or suicidal hermits , a patient in a psychiatric institution has a historical gallery of characters that haunt him....

On vacation in the countryside, a filmmaker thinks about the mourning of his parents. As their faces, and most especially their gaze, fades away, he starts meditating on masks as passages to the afterlife....

A man accepts a concierge job, which comes with a small apartment, in an old building and, locked inside his lodgings, undertakes a strange job of grieving. He discovers that behind the walls, a system of secret corridors allows tenants to be observe...