The 2026 edition of the Courtisane Festival returns to Ghent from 1–5 April, bringing together filmmakers and artists working at the intersection of experimental cinema, political reflection and audiovisual research. The festival continues its long-standing commitment to cinema as a space of inquiry—where historical works and contemporary practices meet in carefully curated thematic programs.
At the heart of the program is Undercurrents, the festival’s long-running screening series dedicated to emerging and exploratory moving-image practices. Bringing together filmmakers from diverse contexts, the programs trace hidden political, aesthetic and social currents shaping contemporary cinema, from feminist and queer re-readings of film history to reflections on labour, identity and resistance. Its eclectic selection includes films by John Smith, Rhayne Vermette, Elena Duque, Basma Al-Sharif, among many others.
Measures of Distance brings together works that examine the spatial and emotional gaps that shape personal and collective histories, while The World I Left Will Not Leave Me reflects on transclass, assembling works made by filmmakers from working-class backgrounds as they navigate this in-betweenness, reaching back across the gap that has opened between their current social position and that of their origin. Together these sections foreground filmmakers who use the medium to revisit fragments of the past, negotiating the complex ties between personal testimony, archival traces and political reality. These sections feature works by artists such as Miko Revereza, Mona Hatoum, Alia Syed, or classic films by Terence Davies & Jean Eustache.
The festival also includes two programs exploring cinema’s relationship to time and perception. Chronochromatic Measures investigates the material and sensory dimensions of film—its rhythms, colours and temporal structures—through works that emphasise the concepts of time and space and the perception of colour in or during the projection. Rigid Time, meanwhile, will focus on the fertile ground of Sudanese cinema spanning from mid 1970s to late 1980s.
