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Film Curating Studies students program three cycles in Courtisane
Natalia Orasanin and Elisa Juri, students from the 2024–2025 cohort, have curated programs that explore the materiality of cinema, the temporal conditions of the filmic experience, and the boundaries within the relationship between image and word. This collaboration stems from a proposal the Belgian festival made to the school.
The 25th edition of the Courtisane Festival (1-5 April) presents three film programs organized by Film Curating students from the 2024–2025 class of Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE). This inter-institutional partnership was initiated by Courtisane as part of an internal reflection on the role of film curatorship, aiming to incorporate new perspectives and voices into its institutional discourse.
Natalia Orasanin is responsible for two programs. The first, "A Motion Study" brings together works by Elena Duque, Anne Rees-Mogg, and Jodie Mack that examine cinematic movement. Drawing on the origins of cinema and its precursors—such as optical toys and chronophotography—the program offers a journey through films that reconstruct movement through collage, pictorial intervention, and animation. The screening will take place on Thursday, April 2, at the Minard, with Elena Duque in attendance.
The second, "Tonight Will Be the End of Meaning" will be screened on Sunday, April 5, at the ARCA. The session includes Penelopa 77 (1977) by Biljana Belić and Dragiša Krstić, and Deux Fois (1968) by Jackie Raynal—two films that challenge the conventions of narrative cinema (dialogue, plot, and the image-word dynamic) while inviting the audience to confront their own interpretive mechanisms. Jackie Raynal herself, a pivotal figure of the Zanzibar group and a pioneer of French experimental cinema, will participate in the session.
Elisa Juri is the curator of "In Their Semi Off-Hours," a double bill screening on Saturday, April 4, at the Sphinx Cinema. The program explores the tensions between labor and leisure, and between the visible and the concealed, through films whose characters inhabit liminal spaces—neither fully active nor entirely at rest. The first session features Khake Sar Beh Mohr (The Sealed Soil) (1977) by Marva Nabili, a film shot in secret in pre-revolutionary Iran. The second session comprises Los páramos (2019) by Jaime Puertas, Theater (2024) by Anastasia Lola, and Les Photos d'Alix (1982) by Jean Eustache—three works that investigate the relationship between characters and the spaces they inhabit or construct, as well as cinema’s capacity to inscribe time.
These programs are part of Undercurrents, the festival’s section dedicated to emerging practices in the moving image. The 25th edition of the Courtisane Festival will be held in Ghent, Belgium, from April 1 to 5, 2026.