Fantômes du passé (comment l'histoire est entrée en moi)
We maintain a long-term dialogue with this Belgian filmmaker, whose irreverence and inventiveness are deployed by dodging traditional forms of cinematic narrative, and by manipulating the art of self-representation with malice and subtlety. This time, he accompanies some of his new films.
In the presence of the director
Fantômes du passé was directed by long-time friends Boris Lehman and Sarah Moon Howe. Around the same time that a wall in Boris's studio cracked, he suffered a heart attack. In the aftermath of the tragic event, the film was made in a state of emergency, as Sarah wanted to delve into her friend's archives.
Boris Lehman
Boris Lehman initially studied piano, but in the early 1960s became interested in photography and cinema. In 1966, after graduating in Film Studies from the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du spectacle, Brussels, he became a film enthusiast and critic, contributing reviews to weekly publications and magazines. He began making films between 1965 and 1983 when working for Club Antonin Artaud, a readjustment day centre for the mentally ill, using cinema as a therapeutic tool with patients. Initially working with amateurs, he has produced 400 films in Super 8, 16 mm or video, as either shorts, features, documentaries, journals or autobiographies, and has shot 300,000 photographs. He wrote the libretto of Fanny Tran's opera La véritable histoire de la Dame Blanche (2020). Lehman's cinematic work has little public recognition but has been shown at numerous festivals and cine clubs.
