Supported projects

MELILLA - The Spanish enclave of Melilla, geographically part of Africa, politically part of the European Union, is located on Morocco's northern coast. The border between the continents here consists of a triple fence with countless pits and guard posts.

ERBIL - What is the involvement of Belgian jihadists in the genocide that IS carried out against the Jezidi community? Now that the Belgian parliament has acknowledged the genocide, Brenda Stoter Boscolo and Bruno Struys went to Iraqi Kurdistan with that question in mind. They talked to official sources, but above all had hours of interviews with the Yezidis themselves.

BRUSSELS - What happened to Dieumerci Kanda? Six years ago, the Angolan man entered a Brussels police station to report his missing wallet. For no apparent reason, he is arrested and locked up in a cell. Three hours later he's dead. The official explanation is that he killed himself. But isn't there more to it?

ANTWERP - The 40-year war in Afghanistan is pushing more and more Afghans to become refugees. Their numbers are also increasing in Belgium. In the port city of Antwerp, Afghans have become the fifth largest nationality group. Gie Goris went to Antwerp and listened to older and younger, male and female, Pashtu and Dari-speaking refugees and migrants from the war-torn country.

TRIPOLI - How much do illegal immigrants suffer from smuggling networks? How do the illegal immigrants get in contact with the smugglers? What is the role of the international community in curbing the spread of this business? Investigative journalist Mahmoud Elsobky searched for answers to these questions and travelled to Libya, Tunisia, France, Germany and Mauritania. There he met with victims of illegal immigration and smugglers.

ALBANIA - Over the past 30 years, Albania has evolved at breakneck speed from an extreme communist dictatorship to an unbridled neoliberal democracy. This makes the country an interesting laboratory for contemporary social developments, such as migration, identity construction or gender and the social role of women. There is a lot to be said about this, because Albanian society has always been very patriarchal. Equality between men and women is hardly an issue.

CAÏRO - Can you love a dictatorship? Well, no, but the Belgian journalist Ruth Vandewalle does not want to leave Egypt after more than ten years. Ten years after Tahrir, she goes looking for answers among her Egyptian friends. Their solution: create your own reality.

AL HOCEIMA - During the summer holidays, Europeans with a Moroccan migration background flock to Al Hoceima. For two months, the tourist resort in the Rif region is flourishing and there is work again. But it's only a little solace for the Rifine population that has to deal with a corrupt government and oppression on a daily basis.

BEVEREN - ‘Jailbirds’ intents to speak about the impact of the Covid-crisis and the lockdown, not only on a practical or economic level but to highlight mental processes and how it influences our psychological state. From a microcosmos: incarcerated life versus universal and collective uncertainty and the feeling of being deprived of physical and social freedom.

NAIROBI - European media regularly report on human rights violations by multinational companies 'from here'. Various Flemish media reported that a Brussels construction company would engage in forced labour in Qatar in preparation for the World Cup. Swedish journalists Tobias Åkerblom and Moa Kärnstrand revealed that a Swedish clothing brand would employ children aged 14 in Myanmar. However, multinationals born and raised in emerging economies are often forgotten.

AUSTIN - Louise Van Assche is a documentary filmmaker who lives and works in Austin, Texas. She was born and raised in Belgium and has Congolese roots. A year ago she moved to Austin, the capital of Texas. There she ended up in the middle of the Black Lives Matter protests. It touched her personally and she decided to take to the streets to make a report.

MERKSPLAS - March 2020. Corona shuts down Belgium. Everyone has to stay inside. Door closed, one hour a day outside. A story that sounds familiar to the residents of Merksplas prison.

BRUSSELS - This is the first article in a series on homelessness focusing on the Belgian capital city, where homelessness has more than doubled in ten years.

FALTECINI - Belgian police and army uniforms are made in Romanian factories with Belgian owners, by seamstresses who can barely make a living from their wages. What is wrong with our public tenders? "As long as price remains the most important award criterion, someone always pays the price.

NEW YORK - The documentary 'Pride is Protest' offers an insight into the LGBTQ scene in New York, 50 years after Stonewall. Marieke Dermul and Filip Tielens went to New York for a week in June 2019 during the biggest Pride ever.

DHAKA - The women in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka are fed up with it: they want to be able to go out on the streets without men bothering them. And so they organise their own transport through the impossibly chaotic, congested traffic: a motor-taxi with a woman at the wheel. Or they buy themselves a motorbike. First alone, as an exception, which provokes opposition and sometimes outright attacks. Now more and more numerous, they close ranks, form motorcycle clubs and lead demonstrations against violence against women.

NEW DELHI - According to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, India is the most dangerous country in the world for women. Nowhere more girls are sold as slaves. In melting Himalayan glaciers, prolonged drought, devastating storms and disappearing islands, human traffickers found new allies. Floods make millions of people homeless, displaced women are easy victims.

GAZA - As early as eight years ago, the UN warned that the Gaza Strip was at risk of becoming unlivable by 2020. At the beginning of that year, De Morgen journalist Martijn Lauwens went to see what that means. He travelled around the isolated Palestinian enclave for a week and asked the people there how they live, how they see the future and what they dream of. 

YEREVAN - Kubra was born and raised in Belgium. However, her family is Turkish, at least, that's what they thought, because she was brought up as a Belgian Turk: with Turkish customs and the Islamic faith. Internal doubts lead her to have a DNA test taken in 2017 to see if she actually has Turkish roots. The test showed that she is not Turkish but Armenian. 

TANGIER - Hirak protests broke out in northern Morocco three years ago. Following the terrible death of a fish seller, the Riffines were crying out for good education, health care, work, fair justice and the fight against corruption. But the regime hit hard, resulting in hundreds of arrests. The leaders of the non-violent Hirak movement were sentenced to twenty years in prison.

ARBIL - In the summer of 2014, IS invaded the Sinjar region in northern Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of residents fled to Iraqi Kurdistan, or to Mount Sinjar, not knowing that help would come days later. Without food or water many died of exhaustion. But IS had come not only to expand the Caliphate, but also to eradicate the Yazidi, a community with its own religion and an ancient culture. Fate awaited residents who were locked down by IS. The men were killed; women and girls sold as slaves and boys were put in IS training camps.

KINSHASHA - In the maternity clinics in Kinshasa, hundreds of mothers and their newborn children are locked up. Weeks, months, sometimes even years. Reason: they cannot pay hospital bills after childbirth. The report "Gasthuis Gevangenis" (Hospital prison) investigates this phenomenon and goes in search of the underlying cause of this problem.

IMIDER - Imider is a very small community, but it has been put on the map by a world record. In the southern Moroccan Atlas Mountains, under a colourful Berber flag, the world's longest sit-in protest is ongoing.

BRUSSELS - They are everywhere. They don't understand. They're good-for-nothings. They're a danger, a plague, a disgrace. In The Indecent, Jan Antonissen goes in search of the people who are being looked at with contempt : the frightened white men and women, the racist vote of the populists, the white trash from our suburbs.

MAPUTO - In poverty-stricken Mozambique, young women are obliged to sell their bodies to wealthier or white men. A general wisdom with cliché status. But is such a simple analysis correct? What does international research say and what do the women themselves think about their sexual practices and social status? 

MECHELEN - Lon Landau is a promising Jewish set designer, whose life takes a dramatic turn during WWII. He's imprisoned in Kazerne Dossin in Mechelen, but he decides to remain optimistic and to do what he can best: build dream worlds.

MOSCOW - Nostalgia or Revolution? Pieter Stockmans and photographer Mashid Mohadjerin travel through a number of important cities in European Russia to capture the revolutionary forces in 2017, 100 years after the Russian revolution of 1917.

PORT MORESBY - Jimmy Hendrickx traveled to a remote tribe in Papua in the footsteps of the Belgian missionary Petrus Vertenten. He worked there about a hundred years ago and saved the tribe from extermination, for which he is still honored.

KAMPALA - Uganda is known as one of the world's worst countries to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT). LGBT people risk cell for fourteen years and are victims of violence and discrimination. Ugandan church leaders call to lynch them, political leaders use them as lightning rods for the real problems.

CARACAS - In "Puerta sin Colores", Marianne Cap, together with reporter Roel Nollet, goes to Venezuela. She worked there for a while in a home for boys with a difficult home situation. Four years later, she returns.