Tableau avec chutes

An enquiry built around a picture – Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Brueghel – and the numerous questions it raises. This is one of them which could encompass all the rest: what exactly does to look mean? A journey inside a picture thus offers the opportunity to travel through Belgium at the approach of the 21st century, and also to bring up a host of questions on what the eye sees: what do we see disappearing under our very eye? Why do we look at specific things? What is a point of view? Philosophers, unemployed people, politicians have a word to say… Their testimonies are interwoven with more intimate extracts from the filmmaker’s diary written from mid-June to mid-October 1996. This question of what we first see enables the film to paint the portrait of a peaceful country where unexpected, undreamt-of things happen- much like in Brueghel’s painting.