Classics 2026: Éric Rohmer

Traditionally, Film Fest Gent – which has its festival centre at Kinepolis – also screens films in all other Ghent cinemas: Studio Skoop, Sphinx Cinema, KASK-cinema and the theatre auditorium at De Vooruit. To accommodate the growing number of visitors, this year we are screening the full Classics programme in one dedicated venue: Auditorium 61 (Onderbergen 61), a beautiful venue waiting to be discovered in the heart of Ghent.

Éric Rohmer, French filmmaker, film critic, and editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma, as well as a key figure of the Nouvelle Vague, makes 'small' films about what are generally considered in cinematic terms to be 'small' subjects: love, loyalty, infidelity, seduction, jealousy, passion, and courtship. The mechanisms, rituals, and strategies involved are the driving force in his films. As colleague Claude Chabrol rightly noted: 'Il n'y a pas de grands et de petits sujets, il n'y a que la façon de les traiter.' Rohmer treats these themes with a finesse, an astuteness, and an almost musical sense of variation on the same motifs that make his work unique.

Classics curator Patrick Duynslaegher takes us through Éric Rohmer's filmography, from his three major cycles Six Contes moraux, Comédies et proverbes, and Contes des quatre saisons, to a number of hors série films (which will not be screened during the Classics programme, but that are very much part of his remarkably coherent oeuvre) in which the same themes reappear.