YPRES BLVD
Director SARAH VANAGT
Countries Belgium
Duration 65 min
Synopsis
The Boulevard d’Ypres in Brussels, with its colourful Mediterranean stores, offers glimpses of the Tales of One Thousand and One Nights. Urban development is driving out these shops selling couscous, dates and olives. Sarah Vanagt turned one the empty stores into a film studio and invited her neighbours – a mix of new inhabitants, asylum-seekers and shopkeepers – to come and tell a story, a contemporary fairy tale. Before the empty store becomes a restaurant, a fitness centre, or an art gallery, the old store-house temporarily functions as a place of memory. The shop, the street, and the storytellers all find themselves at a point zero of history.
The Boulevard d’Ypres in Brussels, with its colourful Mediterranean stores, offers glimpses of the Tales of One Thousand and One Nights. Urban development is driving out these shops selling couscous, dates and olives. Sarah Vanagt turned one the empty stores into a film studio and invited her neighbours – a mix of new inhabitants, asylum-seekers and shopkeepers – to come and tell a story, a contemporary fairy tale. Before the empty store becomes a restaurant, a fitness centre, or an art gallery, the old store-house temporarily functions as a place of memory. The shop, the street, and the storytellers all find themselves at a point zero of history.