Dear all

Welcome to the 31st edition of Festival Belluard Bollwerk International. Over a period of ten days we offer you a kaleidoscope of perceptive, daring, critical and often humorous moments of performing and visual arts, literature, film and music. New to the programme is Focus, in which we give you, the festival goer, the chance to discover the extensive creativity of Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué, through a myriad of projects. 

Another exciting addition is the adventurous SPOTS&DOTS trail through the city, where young artists, individually or as part of a group, invite the wandering spectator to different locations for an unexpected experience.

Festival Belluard Bollwerk International 2014 contemplates issues such as the relationship between fact and fiction, the quotidian experience, new forms of narrative within art, our volatile world and our experience of war and past and present history.

Artists from Angola, South Korea, Norway, China, Croatia, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, USA, Canada, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Cameroon, Lebanon, and Switzerland reveal realities and raise pressing questions about contemporary issues such as politics, economics, media and society. Simultaneously they share a mutual belief in creating a direct and comprehensible dialogue with the audience – so that the audience stays not as a passive spectator but becomes a mental accomplice in the process of creation and reflection. The stories they tell and the images they show are universally identifiable as they relate to aspects of the world that surrounds us. 

For this reason we shout out loud that the Belluard Festival is for and about all!

Cis Bierinckx 
and the Belluard Festival team