Leap of Faith. II. The Absolute Demand

Join us on July 14 at the e-flux Screening Room's rooftop for The Absolute Demand, the second of the four-part screening series , bringing together artists’ films and cinema features from Brazil, Belgium, Spain, Vietnam, Japan, and the United States.

Modern life was supposed to make the world more rational and easier to explain. Yet many experiences resist rational explanation: an illness without a clear cause, an ethical demand that changes a life, the presence of the dead, an image that outlives what it records. The films in this program engage with experiences that transcend what exists within the concrete, physical world. To take a leap of faith, here, is to act on the chance that this world holds more than it shows.

Screenings take place on Tuesdays from July 7–28, 2026, and begin after sunset. Read more about the series here.

II. The Absolute Demand
Tuesday, July 14, 2026, after sunset

Both films center on a call to unconditional action in the face of injustice. In one, women remake their religious lives around a commitment to social justice. In the other, a promise made to a dying man forces a teenager into conflict with his father. In each case, a single decision creates moral obligations whose consequences cannot be controlled or foreseen.
Jonathas de Andrade, Sisters Without a Name (2025, Brazil, 20 minutes)
The film tells the story of a group of Brazilian Catholic women who, in the late 1960s, found in the Gospel a radical call to social justice. Inspired by the nascent Liberation Theology movement, they broke with the official structure of the Catholic Church and began to live according to their own principles: a religiosity focused on the struggle against oppression, the defense of the most vulnerable, and the construction of new community practices. To fully exercise this commitment, they took a vow of anonymity.

Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, La promesse (1996, Belgium, 93 minutes)
La promesse centers on Igor, a teenager working with his father in a business that exploits undocumented migrant workers in Seraing, Belgium. After a worker is gravely injured, Igor makes a promise to the dying man that he will care for his wife and child. This promise forces him into conflict with his father, his inherited moral world, and his own prejudices. The Dardennes strip the drama to an ethical demand that cannot be easily absorbed into social habits.
For more information, contact [email protected].
In case of rain, the event will take place in our indoor Screening Room.
Jean-Pierre Dardenne (b. 1951, Engis) and Luc Dardenne (b. 1954, Awirs) are Belgian filmmakers, screenwriters, and producers. After politically engaged documentaries, they founded Les Films du Fleuve in 1994 and gained international recognition with La promesse (1996), presented at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight. Their films include Rosetta (1999), The Son (2002), The Child (2005), Lorna’s Silence (2008), The Kid with a Bike (2011), Two Days, One Night (2014), Tori and Lokita (2022), and Young Mothers (2025), winner of Best Screenplay at Cannes. They have twice received the Palme d’Or.

Jonathas de Andrade (b. 1982, Maceió, Brazil) lives and works in Recife. Working across film, photography, and installation, he develops projects with local communities and uses documentary and fictional strategies to examine memory, identity, gender, class, race, and social power in Brazil. His solo exhibitions include presentations at the New Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, MASP, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, MAAT, and Foam. In 2022, his project Com o coração saindo pela boca was presented at the Brazilian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale.