120 of Cinema in Brussels

Discover Brussels through cinema

On 26 November, PointCulture will unveil Brussels Footage, a free interface to look at Brussels through 120 years of film - narrative films, documentaries and archival footage, in partnership with SONUMA* and screen.brussels. As a reflection of this city’s kaleidoscopic urban planning and the cosmopolitan mosaic of people who live there, the platform offers a large number of intersectional approaches: themes, dates, and places, allowing everyone to make their own Brussels film.

Created by PointCulture, Brussels Footage is an online platform aimed at promoting the city using audiovisual material such as narrative films, documentaries, music videos, news reports, archival footage, sound documents, and radio shows. All of these works tell the tale of Brussels and its diverse population in their own manner.

The project makes it possible to watch or listen to one or more excerpts from this material, much of which come from PointCulture’s collections. They all come with a description or an article, and a technical data sheet. More than 150 items are already included in the collection and others will be added gradually.

The idea is to give visitors the opportunity to travel virtually in the Brussels space-time continuum, thanks to images and sounds from yesterday and today. To make it easier to discover the people and places that embody this city, the following themes are addressed: wandering, housing, neighbours, youth, women’s portraits, etc.

To learn more about this project, visit Brussels Footage,

 

 

* SONUMA manages the digitisation, preservation and operation of various audiovisual archives for the Wallonia-Brussels Federation of Belgium. Since its creation in 2009, 90,000 hours of radio programs, 90,000 hours of television programmes and 12,000 photos have been digitised. These thousands of hours of audiovisual material are now available to professionals, the teaching and scientific community, and the general public. The partnerships SONUMA has forged with the cultural and non-profit sectors have the two-fold objective of making good use of this audiovisual heritage and of supporting the cultural sector.