Thierry Zéno

A film student from Namur, Thierry Zéno (1950-2017, né Thierry Jonard) directed his first short feature - Bouche sans Fond Ouverte sur les Horizons (Bottomless Mouth Open to the Horizons) - in 1971 and stepped into immortality three years later with the highly controversial Vase de Noces / Wedding Trough. These two key features and the later documentary Des Morts / Of the Dead (1979) have now been digitised and boxed by the Royal Belgian Film Archive (Cinematek), bringing a mostly forgotten but important chapter of Belgian film history, back to life.

The trilingual booklet that accompanies the Brussels Cinematek's Thierry Zéno box set, will tell you about Zéno's background as a student at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion, his first ventures into short filmmaking, and his later preference for documentary features. None of that information, however, will prepare the viewer for the unique oeuvre - or at least a glimpse of it - that he or she is about to discover when sliding the discs in the player from this set that finally restores key works by this scarcely known Belgian director.

The most (in)famous film in this collection is undoubtedly 1974's Vace de Noces, a production that was so controversial that several Belgian government institutions tried their utmost not to be associated with it. Nonetheless, it was still selected for the EXPRMNTL festival in Knokke (that also famously supported Martin Scorsese's 1967 short The Big Shave) and even the Directors' Fortnight at the 1975 Cannes film festival. This tale, shot in hauntingly beautiful poetic contrasts of black and white (that have now been restored to their original glory)...