As part of the TRANF201 course (“Introduction to Sustainability Issues”) and the FNRS NICLAC project (“Narrative and Imaginaries of Climate Action”), Jade de Cock and Sabrina Parent invite you to a screening of two documentaries: Mère Garab by Mamadou Khouma Gueye and La Jungle étroite by Benjamin Hennot. This will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by Dr Jade de Cock, with Benjamin Hennot and Mamadou Khouma Gueye in attendance, the latter via video link (from Senegal).

Mère Garab (Director: Mamadou Khouma Gueye, 2025, 11 minutes)

Smoke rises between the casuarina trees on a strip of land within the public maritime domain. Mère Garab temporarily occupies a plot there. It is a house without walls or a door. She works there and raises her children there. She tends to the plants. She shares her passion for trees with passers-by. The banality of the three daily rituals (the three cups of tea) sparks a modest, philosophical discussion that hints at and echoes the unspoken. Along with the tea foam rise questions of land tenure and women’s access to land. In this house without a door, Mère Garab questions the future and the place of landless farmers.

Mamadou Khouma Gueye is a filmmaker, writer and teacher who divides his time between Guinaw Rails and Nantes. Having studied history at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, he entered the world of cinema by campaigning to make it accessible to the suburbs of Dakar. He then turned to filmmaking, drawing on his own resources and the collective drive of his generation to produce and distribute their films. Selected for the International Competition at Visions du Réel 2025, his first feature film, Liti Liti (Attachment), captures the memory of the working-class neighbourhoods of his childhood, destined to disappear in the name of Senegal’s rail development. True to his convictions, Mamadou has always championed the idea that art must make room for ordinary people and help to shed light on social and political realities that are sometimes difficult to face.

La Jungle étroite (Directed by Benjamin Hennot, 2013, 57 minutes)

A former militant trade unionist, Gilbert Cardon (who died in 2020) was one of the pillars of the “Fraternités Ouvrières” association, based in Mouscron. He runs the weekly drop-in session there, where he never fails to send visitors off to explore his experimental kitchen garden—a sort of lush, edible maze—and offers free gardening lessons as an introduction to the other kingdoms of life. At other times, he explains the conditions under which the huge granary occupying the multi-purpose hall was built, which were necessarily collective.

With a degree in Romance Languages and Literature, a commentator on the work of Clément Pansaers and a specialist in the influence of Taoism on the Dada movement, Benjamin Hennot loves the stories of the underdogs, especially when they triumph. His films, therefore, tell the stories he favours most: the history of popular movements. La Jungle étroite (2013) plunges us into the heart of the ‘Workers’ Fraternities’ of Mouscron, which successfully blended permaculture and popular education, making food biodiversity accessible to all. La Bataille de l’Eau Noire (2015) recounts the remarkable anti-technocratic victory of the anti-dam campaigners in Couvin in 1978, set to the rhythm of their clandestine radio broadcasts, which formed Belgium’s first free radio station. Stan & Ulysse l'esprit inventif (2018) tells the story of a war of liberation, that of two young men from Brussels who became masters of sabotage during the Second World War. His latest film, Détruire rajeunit (2021), retraces the major Belgian strikes of the winter of 1960–1961, with first-hand accounts told by young actors and actresses. What if it were in the blind spots of history that we found its most vibrant expressions?

Free entrance.