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Elias Grootaers
Elias Grootaers (1981) is a Belgian documentary filmmaker and a lecturer in documentary film. His filmography includes Cinema Central (2005), Lignes. En quête d’une mémoire (2006), Not Waving, But Drowning (2009), the video installation The season has changed but we are still standing in the same place (2009) and Inside the Distance (2017). Amongst other films, he worked as a co-editor for Muito além (Mario Gomes, 2010), Kosmos (Ruben Desiere, 2015) and Un pays plus beau qu’avant (Hannes Verhoustraete, 2018), and edited La fleurière (Ruben Desiere, 2017) and Zlata (Mattias Bavré, 2023). From 2006 to 2022, he was a professor at KASK / School of Arts Ghent. He has also taught at LUCA School of Arts, P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He has been a guest professor at the Beijing Film Academy and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In 2013, he co-founded Sabzian, for which he has written articles and compiled and translated texts. From 2013 to 2019, he was Sabzian’s artistic director. He has curated several film programs for Sabzian and under the moniker Zéro de conduite.
A poetic portrait of Giorgi Shakhsuvarian, an Armenian boxing coach from Tbilisi. While working and living in Belgium, he prepares a young boxer for his European championship. The film melds a sense of distance, the floating experience of time and space, and the choreography of boxing.
On their way to the United Kingdom, a group of Indian refugees get stuck in the hermetic non-zones bordering the recreational community of Zeebruges, a Belgian seashore town. In their company we slowly lose all sense of time and place.