The Fifth Season

A small village in the Ardennes region of Belgium. Winter does not end and spring does not come. The carnival fire will not light, the seed does not germinate, the cows give no milk, the bees die. Nobody knows what is happening and nobody leaves the village. As time passes the villagers start looking for a cause; failing to find one, they look for somebody to blame. The family that came from outside is the nearest target. The film was directed by Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth together; the two of them also made Khadak and Altiplano. The telling leans on landscape rather than plot; the scenes are long, the camera mostly still, the dialogue sparse. The apocalypse arrives here not with noise but with nothing happening. The film competed at Venice in 2012. What the village does towards the end says something not about climate but about community.