Jeanet Film Adulte (2025) is a film co-produced with steirischer herbst and NW, Open House for Contemporary Art and Film, and made in collaboration with residents of Aalst. Shot across two editions of the city’s carnival, the work follows the figure of the Voil Jeanet: men cross-dressing as caricatures of the sex worker, poor mother, and madwoman. The film opens in reverse—at night, after the party—a cinematic gesture that echoes Carnival’s core logic of inversion. Beginning near the factory in central Aalst, the camera roots the work in the city’s industrial and working-class history, binding the spectacle to its infrastructural and social underbelly, even as those conditions have shifted. What starts in an atmosphere of quiet unease gives way to glitter, prosthetic flesh, plastic breasts and genitals, baby heads between thighs, and gore in full daylight. Costumes appear as both disguise and weapon, exposing the violence of stereotype while indulging in its grotesque excess.

Directed by Pauline Curnier Jardin
Produced and comissioned by steirischer herbst ’25 & NW, Open House for Contemporary Art and Film