Boulevard d’Ypres / Ieperlaan

In the center of Brussels, with its large, colorful Mediterranean shops, the Boulevard d'Ypres seems straight out of a tale from the Arabian Nights. Before gentrification drove these businesses out of the neighborhood, Sarah Vanagt transformed one of these warehouses into a film studio. A space where the life stories of those who populate the street intersect: shopkeepers, asylum seekers, tenants, Salvation Army residents. Inspired by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, one of the pioneers of “microhistory”, Sarah Vanagt makes the evolution of her own street the starting point for a “microhistorical experiment”. This offshoot of history attempts to decipher the power struggles within society by focusing on certain details and on the psychological worlds created by each and every one of us. In “Boulevard d'Ypres”, the personal stories are fictionalized and seem to take on a mythical dimension, as if these modern-day fairy tales were part of a new oral tradition, at the ground zero of history...