Boris Lehman - Magnum Begynasium Bruxellense

A living chronicle of the residents of the Béguinage neighbourhood – so named because it is situated on the site of the former Brussels béguinage. Designed as an encyclopaedic inventory, the film comprises around thirty chapters, each imbricated with the other, like so many pieces of a puzzle, or resembling a termite mound with many intersecting galleries. It takes place within the space and interstices of a day, starting at dawn and ending at night.
-Boris Lehman

“Boris Lehman, a friend of Chantal Akerman’s, readily defines himself as an experimental filmmaker. He says that he occasionally uses cinema as a therapeutic tool in the Antonin Artaud Club, a rehabilitation center for the mentally ill, where he works. The reference, more than the modern documentary, is the collage – the juxtaposition of around thirty autonomous chapters, organised around a poor neighbourhood in Brussels and taking place over a day or so. Boris Lehman has collected microscopic observations, comical details, and sought atmospheres. He speaks as an entomologist of a familiar world reduced to a series of small touches, furtive impressions. The author, the filmmaker paradoxically becomes the center of the world: perhaps his lm should be read as a kind of journal.”
-Louis Marcorelles LE MONDE