LAURENT VAN LANCKER

Laurent Van Lancker is a multilingual Brussels-based artist. He both studied Filmmaking (IAD) and Anthropology (MA, MPhil in SOAS, London). His works has been shown on television, in cinema theatres, art centers, museums, ... His early documentaries illuminate social, religious and artistic aspects of different cultures, e.g. ‘Ymako’ (Basil Wright Price at the RAI film festival 1998) or ‘Moving with the Clouds’ (Prix Jeunes, Festival Cinema d’Asie 1999). He made a series of short documentaries, called ’Experimental Ethnographies’ (Ethnics Vietnam + Reflectors + Majjudo + disorient, 2001-2012). These films draw on various modes of representations: Self-Reflexive, Auto-Ethnography, Performative, Interactive, Sensorial and Haptic cinema. His most famous work is the long-feature documentary ’Surya’, which has won some international Awards (Golden Deer and Audience Award at Rodos Film and Visual Arts festival, and the SCAM prize), had a theatrical release and was shown worldwide in many major festivals (Paris, Leipzig, Dubai, Durban, Mar del Plata, Montréal, St. Petersburg, Ghent, ...).
His recent work, ‘disorient’, won the First prize at the VideoEX festival in Zürich, was shown as a live performance for the opening of the Courtisane Festival and has been shown in Art centres and museums. He also is involved in the collaborative artistic webproject called Diwans.org. Laurent Van Lancker is a lecturer in documentary and video art at INSAS and IAD (two Belgian national film schools), in Visual Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin, and is coach for the SoundImageCulture workspace. He is one of the founders of Polymorfilms, runs creative AV workshops worldwide and has curated several film programmes for Cinema Nova in Brussels. For Laurent Van Lancker, every project is a new experience, in which a dialogue between form and content, ethics and aesthetics, political and poetical realms is to be found.