Draft:Laurent Van Lancker

Laurent Van Lancker is a Belgian filmmaker, writer, artist, and scholar renowned for his contributions to audiovisual anthropology. Notable among his works are the acclaimed documentary Surya , made in 2007, and the feature film Brak, released in 2016. Holding the position of Professor of AudioVisual and Multimodal Anthropology at Aix-Marseille University. Van Lancker's creative ethos emphasizes the significance of aesthetic storytelling over descriptive or explanatory modes, viewing them as potent vehicles for engaging with cultural politics and addressing themes such as post-coloniality, speculative anthropology, migrations, global storytelling, collaborative theory, and reflexivityy.

Biography

Laurent Van Lancker was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1969. After completing his initial degree in filmmaking, he went on to study Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Upon completion, Van Lancker spent several years working in the film industry. During that time he was a founding member of the film cooperative Polymorfilms. He also helped to found the Brussels-based filmmaker training center known as SoundImageCulture. At that time, Van Lancker also released several short and feature-length films, most notably Surya. Later, he returned to academics for a Ph.D. in Audio Visual Arts at the University of Ghent.

In 2023, Van Lancker assumed the prestigious A*Midex Chair of Excellence Professorship at Aix-Marseille University, collaborating with CNRS to advance novel approaches to narrative structures in anthropological filmmaking. In addition, he is or has been a lecturer and mentor at the international Master's program known as DocNomads, at the University of Münster, and in INSAS Brussels. He has previously taught at the Netherlands Film Academy, at the Art Academy Split, at the LUCA School of Arts, at Goldsmiths, University of London, at SOAS, University of London at the University of Gent, at Yunnan University – East Asian Centre for Visual Anthropology, and at KASK.

Filmography

Van Lancker has directed four feature-length films. Each of the films has explored migration. In addition to directing, he has also been credited as a writer for each film.

Surya (116 mintues, 2007) is Van Lancker's first feature length documentary. It integrates both digital and analog 35mm colour images. The film tells the story of a hero in search of a name and a home. Beginning in Belgium and reaching its conclusion in Vietnam, the story emerges through the creative voices of ten local oral storytellers from each of the countries to which the filmmaker traveled (Slovakia, Turkey, Syria, Kurdistan, Iran, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Tibet, and China). Inspired by the surrealist game of the exquisite corpse, the story brings together divergent narrative styles, voices, and song to construct a story that unfolds in each new location. It is therefore a hybrid as both a documentary of global, oral storytelling traditions and a contemporary, epic tale.

Brak (120 minutes, 2015) is his first fictional film. Van Lancker continued an ongoing collaboration with the Flemish author and musician Elvis Peeters that began in 2000 with the short film Pierre. The story takes place in the near future and follows the story of Lucas, a northern European migrant attempting to flee his collapsing country. It was filmed on location in actual migrant camps and the abandoned city of Doel, Belgium. The film debuted at the Film Fest Ghent.

Kales (63 minutes, 2017) is a collaborative film that integrates the filmmaker's own visits to a migrant camp in France known as The Calais Jungle and the narration and images created by the immigrants living there. With little context offered by the filmmaker besides an epigraph from the opening lines of Dante's Inferno, the film tells its story strictly through the inhabitants' own voices, dreams and the social conditions that emerged during their time in the camp. The film debuted at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.

Nous Autres or We Others (129 minutes, 2022) is a collaborative fiction film that combines multiple perspectives on the migrant experience. The film tells the story of 8 migrants from different global regions hidden in the container of a lorry. Locked in the darkness as the truck progresses along its path, the collection of people begin to get to know each other through personal stories and through retelling those of others they have met while traveling. Under its working title "Of Dogs and Gods", this film won the Cineli Digital Award at the 2021 Cannes Marché du Film.

Nominations

Moving with the clouds: Art and identity of the Vietnamese Diaspora - Youth award at Festival Cinema d’Asie de Vesoul (France)

Ymako: an invisible act for an African reality - Basil Wright Price 98 at RAI Film Festival (London)

Shima, 8 years old + One Lokman (co-produced with DRIk) - Meena Award 2005 - UNICEF

Surya - Golden Deer and Audience Award at Rodos Int. Film and Visual Arts Fest, SCAM Documentary Prize 2007 (Belgian Cinema Distribution).

Disorient - First Prize at VideoEX Film Festival 2011, Zurich.

Brak - Best Image, Best Actor, Special Mention at AVANCA 2016 Film Festival

Kalès - Best film and QDC prizes at FATP film festival 2017

We Others (under the title "Of Dogs and Gods"): Cineli Digital Award at the 2021 Cannes Marché du Film.

Main Publications

- Experiencing Cultures: Cinematic Ethnography (2024), Manchester University Press.

- With(in) Each Other: Sensorial Strategies in Recent Audiovisual Work in Anthropology and Art Practice, (2013) eds A. Schneider & C.Wright, Routledge

- Not just Numbers: EDUCATIONAL TOOLKIT ON MIGRATION AND ASYLUM IN EUROPE, (2009) Van Lancker eds. and others (Polymorfilms), IOM & UNHCR

for full list: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-7429-6686

Other inputs

Van Lancker has recently turned to non-standard, multi-channel video installations. His Limbo installation is a 5-channel quadriphonic video artefact first displayed at the Argos Center for Audio Visual Arts in Brussels, Belgium.