Supported projects

ISLAMABAD - The American president Obama described a part of Pakistan as ‘the most dangerous place on earth’. The country is dangerous in two ways: dangerous to itself, as few places yield as many bomb attacks and victims, but also dangerous to the rest of the world, as the bombings are exported and Pakistan is a nuclear power, with ‘Islamic’ bombs that are perhaps not sufficiently secured.

KINSHASA - White Elephant is a documentary about the Central Post-Office and its employees in Kinshasa, DR Congo.

URUMQI - Xinjiang is a province of China, with the statute of ‘Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’ under control of the central Chinese government. It is very Chinese and at the same time it seems not Chinese at all.

YAMOUSSOUKRO - Anthropologist Karel Arnaut and photographer Raymond Dakoua have been following the patriotic militants since 2003. They describe and show the ex-militia members in their everyday environment and introduce the public to the world of the young ex-combatants, their activities and limitations, their memories and their expectations for the future. A report on their most recent stay in Ivory Coast. 

SALAR DE UYUNI - Uyuni is a backward region in the South of Bolivia. Bult the salt lake of Uyuni is rich with lithium, the commodity for the production of batteries, soon also for batteries for electrical vehicles. For this raw material a game of chess is being played between some multinational companies, the people of Uyuni and Bolivia's government.

TRIPOLI - Sub Saharan refugees and migrants get stranded in Libya, one of the most important transit countries, on their way to Europe. The European Union tries to keep migrants from reaching Europe by making expensive deals with the Libyan Government. 

SREBRENICA - 15 years after the war in Bosnia over 7000 refugees still live in ‘temporary’ refugee camps in the heart of Europe. The Bosnians themselves want to forget about them, the NGO’s have left the country, moved on to new conflict zones. But the people are still there.

BRUSSELS - Everywhere people are on the move. In search of a better life. Europe is bursting at the seams with new citizens. The old continent is struggling with the immigration phenomenon; and handling it with amazing ineptitude. The question is not: who is welcome and who is not? The question has to be: how are we to accommodate all these newcomers?

KINSHASA - In July 2009, the American magazine Foreign Policy published its annual list of failed nation-states. The Democratic Republic of Congo occupied fifth place, after notoriously dysfunctional states like Somalia, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Chad, and ahead of war-torn countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. This performance was particularly depressing, given the high hopes that surrounded the presidential election of 2006, the first democratic ballot since the country gained independence in 1960. In fact, a few years into the new administration, the country seems to be doing even worse, despite its immense natural resources.

BRUSSELS - Due to the banking crisis the Belgian government had to bail out 4 major financial institutions in 2008 and 2009 to prevent them from bankruptcy. Fortis, KBC, Dexia and Ethias initially received more than 20 billion of tax payers' money which they will have to reimburse eventually. But which role does the government play in the meantime now that it acquired seats as an important stakeholder in the governing boards of these banks?

GABORONE - Ask any average Belgian, or any European for that matter, to name three words he associates with sub-Saharan Africa. The odds are big he will come up with for instance ‘war’, ‘hunger’ and ‘rape’.

NOVOSIBIRSK - Debby Huysmans shows a photographic research on forgotten and isolated communities in Siberia. The two longest rivers of Siberia, the Yenisey and Lena, guided the photographer through the desolated area in search of individuals who experience this area as their biotope and the marks they leave in the landscape that surrounds them. Remainders of dreams of the past and signs of hope for the future appear through the daily environment.

MUMBAI - With financial support from the Fonds Pascal Decroos, Nick Meynen followed carbon credit money flowing from Belgium to India, where he discovered a desert full of mirages. Part from the fraud and abuse, he also noticed the difference in approach between Flanders and Belgium, the buyers of carbon credits.

TARINKOT - How does a man with only a motorbike, a satellite phone and a small group of confidants become President of Afghanistan? In Expedition Uruzgan, Bette Dam reveals how Hamid Karzai liberated the province of Uruzgan from the Taliban after 11 September 2001. This was a crucial moment in Afghan history.

BUDAPEST - One year ago, the Belgian government purchased two million tonnes of CO₂ emission rights from Hungary. This €26 million investment is intended to help the country meet its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce emissions by 7.5 per cent by 2012 compared to 1990 levels.

HAVANA - Everyone has an opinion about Cuba, but in 'Cuba after Castro' Lode Delputte shows what is really at stake. Cuba's future is inextricably linked to its self-proclaimed glorious past. No reasonable person would doubt that Fidel Castro's time is long gone. Even the political elite in Havana have come to understand that today's revolution is but a glimpse of what it used to be.

KABUL - There will soon be 100,000 Western troops in Afghanistan, including 400 Belgians. Yet year after year, the insurgents are gaining ground.

BRUSSELS - 'Gypsies. Sinti and Roma under the swastika' is the first Dutch-language overview book on the fate of Sinti and Roma in Europe during the Nazi era, from 1933 to 1945. Like the Jews, the so-called 'Gypsies' were persecuted because, according to Nazi ideology, they were an inferior race.

PANKOVKA - Now aged 83, Oswald Van Ooteghem has lived many lives. When he was 16, he volunteered to join the Flemish Legion and fight alongside the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front in Russia.

LUSAKA - Elections will be held in Zambia on 28 September 2006. President Mwanawasa hopes that voters will reward his efforts to combat corruption, but the likelihood of this is low. This is because Mwanawasa himself appears to have anything but clean hands. Meanwhile, Zambia and the rest of the world are still far from resolving the enormous looting network of former president Frederick Chiluba.

NEW DELHI - Grensloos India (India without frontiers) is a collection of critical travel essays with political depth. The book is a combination of travelogue, reflection and reportage on various facets of modern India: globalisation, the computer industry, religion and politics, poverty and exclusion, political extremism, tourism and the rise of the Indian middle class.

BEIJING - China has been on a spectacular economic rise for several years. It threatens to overtake Europe and the US as a global power. Is it a bubble that is about to burst, or should the West really fear the "yellow peril"? Who are China's modern-day gold-diggers, and are Chinese workers being exploited?

TUXTLA GUTIÉRREZ - In January 2004, it will be ten years since the Zapatista Army of Liberation (EZLN) took up arms in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The rebels set themselves an unlikely mission: to declare war on neoliberalism.

BRUSSELS - The outgoing Belgian finance minister, Didier Reynders, has secured eight secret contracts with tobacco manufacturers to fund the Rodin Foundation's anti-smoking campaigns.

BRUSSELS - Europe is expanding. May 2004 will be the moment of truth. Europe will then extend beyond the tundra of Finland, the sovkhozes and kolkhozes of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the billboard-cluttered landscape of Poland, the gypsy settlements of Slovakia and the nationalism-ridden countryside of Hungary. In another three years, poverty-stricken Romania and Bulgaria will join the European Union.

BRUSSELS – Marleen Teugels came face to face with the suffering of ailing Balkan veterans almost by chance. Shocked by their stories, she has delved ever deeper into the alien military world since the autumn of 1999. She has gradually come to realise that these complaints, obscure files and horrific facts form part of a single, larger narrative. It is about the insignificance of human life. Everything must give way to blind doctrine and economic and political interests. Soldiers and civilians are equally irrelevant.

ZAVENTEM - Steven Decraene, Peter Denruyter and Geert Sciot are three journalists who have delved into the complex and tragic Sabena case. Sabena was the first national airline in Europe to disappear. How did this happen to the country's flying monument?

OUAGADOUGOU - When freelance photographer Karl Deckers realised he had not received any Annual Progress Reports about his foster child anymore for the years 1999 and 2000, he looked through the reports from 1992 to 1998. To his surprise, each year's report seemed to be more or less a copy of that of the year before. Deckers decided to go and have a look at the situation himself.

GOMA - Today, Congolese Tutsis are returning home to the region where they have lived for centuries, and which, according to their leaders, rightfully belongs to them. Calling themselves 'Kongomani', or 'citizens of Congo', they are prepared to fight for their rights. They believe that the Congolese Hutus and other local tribes can live alongside them in peace.

JERUSALEM - Needless to say, the 'new intifada' in Israel/Palestine is having a major international impact. On the one hand, it is one of the longest-running and most mediatised conflicts of the post-war era; on the other hand, the coverage seems to be mostly one-sided. By this, Abicht means that the Israeli-American point of view receives much more attention than the Palestinian one, but also that the focus tends to be on external events and visible actions, while the underlying emotions and interests require much more attention.