Supported projects

EGYPT - In Belgium lives a small, unknown minority from the Middle East: Coptic Christians from Egypt. For many, migration was a choice for a better life, others point to the penal position of Copts as a minority in Egypt.

BRUSSELS / AMSTERDAM - Ivo Van Hove has conquered the world. As the leader of the largest theater company in the Netherlands, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, he makes theater productions that are enthusiastically welcomed worldwide.

PORT MORESBY - Jimmy Hendrickx traveled to a remote tribe in Papua in the footsteps of the Belgian missionary Petrus Vertenten. He worked there about a hundred years ago and saved the tribe from extermination, for which he is still honored.

MOLENBEEK - the Distance Between Us’ takes its starting point in some audio cassettes artist and photographer Jan Locus received from a Moroccan family in Molenbeek a few years ago. Probably going back to the early 1980s, the cassettes contain an oral correspondence between families in Brussels and ...

ABUJA - Inspired by the staggering success of its Nollywood film industry, Nigeria is now looking to boost its other creative industries. Culture is being touted as the country's next oil. The government has described the cultural sector as "potentially the biggest source of economic growth" and has ...

TEHERAN - Sex before marriage is punishable by lashes and incarceration. Adultery even with the death penalty. And that is why promiscuous sexual behavior in Iran is the norm. Two journalists, with the support of the Pascal Decroos Fund, made a captivating undercover report from the underbelly of ...

PORTO-NOVO - Yovo Bonsoir breaks the clichés about Africa. The white volunteer travelling in the West African country of Benin is the guide. With the help of local colleagues, three young Flemish journalists investigate the true nature of "voluntourism", a popular holiday trend that combines tourism ...

DRESDEN - During the Second World War just about every Nazi-leader had its own art collection. The hunger for art was enormous. Which paintings were brought from Belgium to Nazi Germany?

HARDIN - Sitting Bull personifies the mystery of the Indians. One of the few whites who enjoyed Sitting Bull's confidence was Father Pieter-Jan De Smet, a Jesuit from Dendermonde (Belgium) who came to rescue the Indians. The savage story of these two men is overwhelming. Karl van den Broeck goes in ...

MÜNCHEN - A painting that saved the lives of more than 30 people but has been lost for almost eight decades. A case of looted art that leads from Germany’s present right into its dark past. That is the subject of the Kunstjagd investigation, a crowdsourced hunt for a piece of art.

KIGALI - In April 2015, it will be exactly 50 years ago that Ché Guevara celebrated his happy arrival in Congo. In December it will be exactly 50 years ago that he sadly retreated. Jérôme Sebasoni crossed Ché Guevara on his guerrilla and followed him all the way to Cuba.

OKEIGBO - Yemi Oduwale, a Flemish boy born in '86, has a Belgian mother and a Nigerian father. His grandfather is ill and wants Yemi to succeed him as 'chief' in Nigeria. But Yemi was born and raised in Europe and doesn't know anything about the culture of the Yoruba, one of the largest tribes in ...

MALI -  In comic strips Timbuktu is the end of the world, and the Tuareg who live there have been attracting westerners for centuries. With minimal means they survive in the Sahara, heroically fighting the colonial occupation. Volkswagen named a car after them.

BRUSSELS - Europe is not doing well. At least, that is what we would say if we would talk about it at all. Because we rarely mention our continent, let alone discuss it in detail. Europe, that's what's going on above our heads. We don't care. Europe costs us too much and dictates too much.

PALERMO - Italy: it is not a neighbouring country and yet it often feels like it is. But how well do we know that country and its people? Couldn't our knowledge of Italy and the Italians, almost seventy years after they emigrated en masse to our country, reach a little further? 

CAIRO - In Egypt the aftermath of a bloody summer is still palpable. In the southern city of Minya, the blackened church spires contrast a group of demonstrators holding yellow balloons: Morsi supporters are demanding that their president rule once again.

SAMARINDA - About one third of the natural vegetation on the island of Borneo, one of the most biodiverse places in the world, was lost in the past thirty years. Through the decades, scientists and conservationists working on the island have grown a thick skin, and came to realize that reserves will ...

BAGHDAD - Zelfa Madhloum went to Iraq to find Iraqis returning to their country after having emigrated. What is more, it was her first visit to her country of origin. Against everyone's advice, she decided to follow her destiny in Iraq. She immerses herself in the new, shocking world, gets to know ...

CAIRO - Late 2011, early 2012. While people are dying on Tahrir Square, four Belgian photographers go in search of personal stories in a metropolis of 20 million inhabitants where fault lines have suddenly been enlarged. This results in images that you don't see on TV or in the newspaper.

NEW YORK CITY - It's highly unusual. In October 2012, after years of friendly relations, Margot Vanderstraeten was able to get access to a small group of Antwerp modern-orthodox Jews who started a new life in New York – and don't want to leave. "I truly feel at home here. I can be truly Jewish here ...

CAIRO - Baharak Bashar was thirteen when she fled from Iran to Belgium with her mother. Away from the ayatollah's and their religious narrow-mindedness.

MAPUTO - To his great surprise, film journalist and historian Guido Convents was told by Portuguese journalists in 2006 that Mozambique had no significant film culture or production. Even within the Belgian film industry, nobody seemed to have any knowledge of Mozambican cinema.

WASHINGTON DC - 'De kleuren van Amerika' (The colours of America) provides an overview of American diversity in all of its forms. The multicultural society is not all sunshine and roses, but a work in progress, with beautiful and ugly sides, successes and failures.

SARAJEVO - In December 2009, for the first time in eighteen years, a direct train departed from Belgrade to Sarajevo, from the current Serbian to the Bosnian capital. In 1991, that connection had been suspended. President Tito's multinational Yugoslavia fell apart, and for four years a war raged ...

KIEV - For more than 40 years Tatyana Jablonskaya's name and signature have been the pride of soviet realism's paintings. Her masterpieces, vibrant, popular scenes of a dream life in the USSR, illustrated communist propaganda appearing everywhere from reproductions in schoolbooks and political ...

BRUSSELS – For the first time, Lusobelgae sheds light on the Portuguese community in Brussels, from the first wave of migration in the 1960s (political and economic refugees fleeing the Salazar regime) to the present day. The community is divided between traditional labour migration and EU officials ...

BAMAKO - The river Niger, Mali's vein of life, is in danger. Photographer Raymond Dakoua shows the great economic, social, human and ecological importance of Africa's third longest river. 'Le Djoliba' means 'the river' in the Bambara language.

ANTWERP – Theatre director and journalist Michaël De Cock set out to explore his own city, seeking answers to a question that has been troubling him: just how divided is Antwerp?

BEIJING - China is everywhere. Yet we know little or nothing about the country and its people. What we mainly notice is that there are more and more Chinese people around. Today, there are around 1.3 billion of them. They are people with dreams, aspirations and hopes. Lots of hopes. This book is ...

NEW DELHI - Grensloos India (India without frontiers) is a collection of critical travel essays with political depth. The book is a combination of travelogue, reflection and reportage on various facets of modern India: globalisation, the computer industry, religion and politics, poverty and ...