Archibelge!

Sofie Benoot
Born in Bruges, Belgium in 1985. She completed a master’s degree in Audiovisual Arts, specialising in Documentary Film, at the LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. She now teaches there. Her films are patchworks of different stories, which are carefully puzzled together to reveal hidden connections.

Filmography
2007 Fronterismo; 40 min. 2010 Blue Meridian; 80 min. 2014 Desert Haze; 110 min.

Olivier Magis
Magis was born in Brussels. He graduated in directing at the lnstitut des Arts de Diffusion after directing his final film Le Secret des Dieux, in 2004. This short film, a mockumentary, uses the mad cow scandal as a pretext for an investigative narrative, in order to question the critical relationship between viewers and the media. According to Muriel Andrin, Professor of Writing and Film Analysis at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, "Magis kidnaps television images in favour of another story, a fake documentary, a docu-fiction, following in the footsteps of Peter Watkins or William Karel, on the thin line where reality meets imagination".

In 2013, he directed his first creative documentary, Ion, produced by Dérives (Dardenne brothers and Julie Frères). This film tells the story of Ion Beleaua, a visually impaired former political refugee, who works as a police auxiliary in Liège.[Broadcast on Belgian television and awarded in numerous international festivals, the documentary also received the Special Mention at the SCAM Discovery Prizes, audiovisual section[8]

In 2014 he directed Les Fleurs de l'Ombre, a documentary diving into Romania, in a Miss competition for visually impaired women. This competition organized by the Romanian Association of the Blind is not ordinary, however: it rewards the inner beauty of the participants. In 2015, the film won the Best Documentary (ex-aequo) at the South East European Film Festival in Los Angeles.

In 2015, he directed two episodes of the Babel Express television documentary collection,[11] broadcast on ARTE and RTBF.

The following year, he collaborated on the documentary trilogy Archibelge!, a television serie questioning the ugliness of architecture in Belgium. Magis directed the first episode, entitled "Brussels, or the quest for identity", and questioned the complex roots of the urban and architectural problems in Brussels

His first short fiction film, May Day, co-directed with Fedrik De Beul, was released in 2017. This film plunges the viewer into the heart of a job strangely put up for auction. Broadcast on RTBF, BeTV, CANVAS, Canal+, TV5 Monde, May Day is rewarded at many international festivals. 

In addition to directing, Magis teaches comparative directing at the Ecole Supérieure de Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ESRA) in Brussels and documentary cinema at the SAE Institute in Brussels.