Theresa Russell to be Jury President at 52nd Film Fest Gent amid tribute to Nicolas Roeg

Together with the jury - whose members will be announced later on - Theresa Russell will consider the Official Competition of Film Fest Gent 2025. This competition puts the impact of music on film in the spotlight since 1980. At the end of the festival, the International Jury will award the Grand Prix for Best Film and the Georges Delerue Award for Best Soundtrack or Sound Design.

Theresa Russell

Theresa Russell was born in 1957 in San Diego, California. At fourteen she was discovered by a photographer and at nineteen she made her big film debut. Directed by Elia Kazan, she starred in The Last Tycoon (1976) alongside acclaimed stars such as Robert De Niro, Tony Curtis, Jeanne Moreau and Robert Mitchum. Russell has since appeared in more than fifty films and television series. Despite her striking performances in Black Widow (1987, Bob Rafelson), Whore (1991, Ken Russell), Kafka (1991, Steven Soderbergh) and Wild Things (1998, John McNaughton), she will forever be associated with Nicolas Roeg’s visionary work, to whom she became a muse and with whom she shared a marriage and two sons. Together, they made six films, including the radical and erotically charged Bad Timing (1980), the near-metaphysical epic Eureka (1983) starring Gene Hackman and the often overlooked psychosexual drama Track 29 (1988), in which Russell plays a frustrated housewife alongside Christopher Lloyd and a young Gary Oldman. Russell faded from the spotlight in the 2000s, but she never stopped acting. She appeared mainly in television series and independent films such as The Believer (2001, with Ryan Gosling) and Jolene (2008, with Jessica Chastain).

Fractured Visions: A Nicolas Roeg Retrospective

Next to actress Theresa Russell, Film Fest Gent also welcomes Nicolas Roeg’s films. Roeg, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 90, is one of the most elusive and groundbreaking voices in British cinema of the last century. With the programme Fractured Visions: A Nicolas Roeg Retrospective, curated by Patrick Duynslaegher, the festival presents a psychedelic trip through a radical and experimental body of work that notably includes musical legends Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Art Garfunkel. Bowie even once called Roeg “an old wizard” and according to actor Donald Sutherland, the filmmaker was a “fearless visionary”.

Nicolas Roeg began his career as a cinematographer for directors such as Roger Corman and François Truffaut, but soon made a name for himself as an uncompromising director, famous and infamous for his bold, fragmentary narrative structures, hallucinogenic images and psychosexual themes. Roeg especially left his mark on the 1970s and 1980s, with films that engaged all the senses through their stylistic bravado. Whether he was portraying wandering children in the Australian outback (Walkabout), a labyrinthine Venice (Don't Look Now), repulsive witches (The Witches), psychedelics and eroticism (Performance) or an extraterrestrial David Bowie (The Man Who Fell to Earth), the British filmmaker always distorted his films into groundbreaking prisms that manipulate reality in many ways.

Sensual, intellectual, brutal, yet poetic and emotional at the same time. Roeg's visual language is a benchmark in film history. Jump cuts, fragmented narratives, associative montages, psychosexual and existential themes, hallucinations, explicit sex and identity confusion… All find their place in Nicolas Roeg’s intense puzzles. With the Classics programme Fractured Visions: A Nicolas Roeg Retrospective, Film Fest Gent adds another piece to the puzzle and makes his work accessible once again to the general public.

The Roeg Files (in Dutch)

Those who prefer to read up individually can also consult the FFG print publication on the Classics programme, in which curator Patrick Duynslaegher provides context for each film, as well as insights into some crucial aspects of Roeg’s oeuvre. The publication will be distributed free of charge from early July and will also be available at all festival locations from September onward.

Dig even deeper online thanks to The Roeg Files, a collection of longer texts by Patrick Duynslaegher and a reissue of an interview with actress Theresa Russell. The online file with all the additional material will soon be available at filmfestgent.be/theroegfiles.

Programme Fractured Visions