Michel Baudour

Movies

The Last Temptation of the Belgians
Director of Photography
This is the story of a father, Jan, a cultural host in a hostile environment, and his daughter Marie, an occasional stripper, who are on the edge of a precipice. She wants to jump and he tries to hold her back. How? By telling him stories, as in the tales of "Arabian nights". As long as he holds her attention, she will not jump.
Les Hommes d'argile
Director of Photography
Sulayman, with blazing eyes, his radiant face, lives in “the clay boulder” in perfect harmony with fauna and flora. An orphan since the age of three, he was raised by an old hermit, with "stormy veins". Sulayman meets Khadija, the daughter of the village head, Caïd. Caïd is a supporter of the French occupation, and is strictly opposed to any union between Sulayman and his daughter. The young shepherd, through the deepest fibres of his soul, finds himself between two worlds. His greatest wish would be to not have to choose, but as he must, Sulayman sets out to unite them within the heart of his new journey... "Men of Clay" is a metaphysical tale about the human condition. This journey explores the fibers of the soul, transcends certainties and contradictions, such as the vulnerability of being or fields of confusion. It cracks and obligates one to rebuild and enhance all aspects of beauty within a universe that ends up breathless...
Making Of - Kamikaze
Cinematography
A Tunisian breakdancer falls in with fundamentalists with designs to turn the young man into a suicide bomber.
Au-delà de Gibraltar
Director of Photography
Bruxelles mon amour
Director of Photography
3 generations of filmmakers tell a story about Brussels, 3 stories settled in the rue Saint Quentin, a forgotten street somewhere in the shadow of the European administration area.
Regarde-moi
Cinematography
A man writes a play, hoping that it will help him understand the dramatic events his son lived in Greece.
Verboden te zuchten
Cinematography
Writer Joris (the author's alter-ego) has packed in his job and left his routine. He wanders through Brussels, pretending to be in other places and as far as we can verify lying to everyone. He stays in a dead-beat motel and meets other absurd people, never to any actual end. Will it be different when he meets Luzie and falls in love?
The Alarm Clock
Director of Photography
t's 6:20 a.m. The camera pans a slew of alarm clocks that start to ring simultaneously, all set to awaken a solitary middle-aged man. The alarms are elaborate: in addition to traditional clocks, horns blow, bright lights flash, and a pot even blows smoke at the sleeper. After several minutes, the bed itself finally bounces him to his feet and he begins to make his way through his house, slowly, keeping only a step ahead of things falling, or cutting through the air head high. He grabs his coat, shambles out the door - and it becomes apparent why it is he must wake up. These surprising duties completed, it's time for an espresso. It arrives like clockwork, right on schedule.
Anchoress
Director of Photography
Enter the medieval world of Christine Carpenter, a visionary girl who is to become an Anchoress (walled-in recluse) so that she can "live in the Virgin's house forever." Based on actual letters that were written about such an Anchoress in 1325, the film follows Christine as she awakens to her own sensuality and explores her own female, earth-based spirituality.
Anton Webern
Director of Photography
Anton Webern's "Langsamer Satz" for string quartet was performed as part of the "My GAIA" concert during the Festival's 2012 edition. Composed in 1905, "Langsamer Satz" is in traditional sonata form and in the key of C Major; it would be another twenty years before Webern turned to twelve-tone technique. "Langsamer Satz" premiered in 1962, seventeen years after Webern's death, and has the longest playing time of any piece in his body of work.
Cher frangin
Cinematography
The French military is known for its draconian treatment of soldiers who desert or otherwise tangibly register disagreements with official policy. In this movie the story takes place during the Algerian War (late 1950s). Alain (Luc Thullier) is a deserter who has been sent back to the front lines as a member of a special disciplinary battalion. Such battalions are given only the most dangerous assignments, and most of the soldiers in them are expected to die in combat. As his unit skirmishes with the enemy, it suffers many losses until Alain is the only one left. Freed from supervision once more, he escapes again, this time to Tunisia, with the intention of trying to inform the French public about what is really happening in Algeria.
Clara
Director of Photography
Pepita a Flemish nun of Mexican descent decides to go to Mexico just as her godmother Clara did years before.
Woodplum
Cinematography
Children find a baby in the forest.
The Bear Cage
Director of Photography
In the Brussells suburb known as "Bear Cage," a poor grocer is at odds with his sexually hyperactive and fashionably Maoist son, who is also a college student. When the students at the college stage a protest in which his son is involved, his exasperation mounts.
Ne pas stagner
Cinematography
This film is not a document about madness, any more than a film-truth investigation. It is a reflection of the experience of the Club Antonin Artaud's theater group (social and cultural rehabilitation center for the mentally ill, located in the Begijnhof district of Brussels and in which Boris Lehman was a leader for many years). Through the playful and instinctive creation of a piece built from collective improvisations, the actors' desire is expressed to "not stagnate, to be able to get away with it and to stand on its own".
Home Sweet Home
Director of Photography
Jules, a rebellious septuagenarian, foments a revolt in his home ruled by quasi-military rules. He and his twenty supporters will oppose the management, the firefighters and even the gendarmes.
La fille dans la vitrine
Cinematography
Cold Head
Cinematography
Shots of a car speeding down the road are intercut with kinky sex flashes (a woman with a whip rides a guy, for instance). Then the car crashes into a tree, the male driver (Christian Chaix) is decapitated and the bloody, injured female (Marie-Paule Mailleux) scoops up his head and returns to her home. There, she cleans herself and the head off, prepares dinner for herself and the head, buys the head a Ken Doll to keep it company, puts the head on a mannequin's body and then has a series of strange hallucinations, which include having sex with her bloodied lover, dancing in a room by herself with a spotlight, etc. Things culminate in her having sex with the head and then throwing it into the trash bin.