Jean Counet

What happens if you give magic mushrooms (psilocibine) to experienced Zen practitioners who have never used drugs? What does that teach us about the mystical experience of oneness with nature? Based on these questions, psychiatrist Franz Vollenweider and Zen master Vanja Palmers set up a legal science experiment in a monastery at the top of Mount Rigi in Switzerland. Exactly 50 years after the magic mushrooms were officially banned, a new story begins in what is now called the “psychedelic renaissance”. While in 2021 most studies with psychedelics mainly focus on their promising medical applications, Frans and Vanja are already going a step further. Can the combination of meditation and psilocibin help humanity get out of the mess we have created on ourselves and the planet with our neo-liberal society?

A young couple - she a director, he an actor - head for a crisis when she asks him to play the leading role in her movie about racism.

Visitors to the temples of modern art in global cities will be familiar with the white cube gallery space. But when one arises in the middle of a Congolese palm oil plantation, the effect is deeply disorienting. Furthermore, it draws attention to the often overlooked ties between colonialism and the art world, for example, through the multinationals that now proudly sponsor these Western museums. This Congolese arts center is part of artist Renzo Martens’s unorthodox plan to jump-start the local economy. Former workers at the plantation make sculptures that are reproduced in chocolate, and then exhibited in New York. The plantation workers, most of whom earn a dollar or less a day, use the profits from this successful exhibition to buy back the land confiscated from them by Unilever.

The tendency in the world is right-wing, neo-liberal, and people are more controlled. We have less liberty even if we think we have more. The last territory where we can be ourselves and where we can have full freedom is our own body. "BARE" documentary focuses on male nudity in the modern dance. The story follows a well-known Belgian choreographer Thierry Smits through a process of building his new creation with a group of male dancers performing bare naked.

We get up, go to work, eat and go to bed. Is our life about daily rituals or is there a deeper, more inscrutable meaning of life? Kjeld lives surrounded by nature in his small house and soon becomes a father. He seeks satisfaction in the simplicity of life in nature. Anna is a young artist looking for answers in her poetry and music. A philosophical documentary essay in which the search for the core of life is central. How should we live if there are no answers anywhere?

A feast for the eye, this essay on trompe-l’oeil, deception, privileges, seductions and false freedoms. The façade of public life hides the private lives of individuals and hidden agendas. We develop new skills to test our happiness in the non-stop flow of images and information. How to live in the post-privacy age?

A poignant insight into the world of sport, where talent, passion and endurance mean everything, but give no guarantee of success.

When two lovers embark on an adventurous journey through Lithuania, an unexpected crisis puts their relationship to the test.

A young woman in Taipei is confronted with the blindness of her mother who is convinced she has a sixth sense. Shot with little facilities, but it is Verbeek’s most mature film - about uprooting, spirituality and modernity.