Supported projects

BEIJING - China is everywhere. Yet we know little or nothing about the country and its people. What we mainly notice is that there are more and more Chinese people around. Today, there are around 1.3 billion of them. They are people with dreams, aspirations and hopes. Lots of hopes. This book is about ordinary Chinese people. The similarities between them and us Westerners are greater than the differences.

NEW DELHI - Grensloos India (India without frontiers) is a collection of critical travel essays with political depth. The book is a combination of travelogue, reflection and reportage on various facets of modern India: globalisation, the computer industry, religion and politics, poverty and exclusion, political extremism, tourism and the rise of the Indian middle class.

TUXTLA GUTIÉRREZ - In January 2004, it will be ten years since the Zapatista Army of Liberation (EZLN) took up arms in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The rebels set themselves an unlikely mission: to declare war on neoliberalism.

BRUSSELS - Europe is expanding. May 2004 will be the moment of truth. Europe will then extend beyond the tundra of Finland, the sovkhozes and kolkhozes of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the billboard-cluttered landscape of Poland, the gypsy settlements of Slovakia and the nationalism-ridden countryside of Hungary. In another three years, poverty-stricken Romania and Bulgaria will join the European Union.

Doha – At the end of 2000, Lut Vandeykeybus set off for Qatar, armed with a camera, lavalier microphones and countless cassettes, to fulfil a long-held dream of making a film about life in a harem. She had already travelled there once a few months earlier to do some preliminary research and familiarise herself with Qatari life.

SALVADOR DA BAIA - The popularity of world music has been on the rise in recent years. But often the countries of origin of the musicians in question are only in the news because of wars, disasters or economic crises. The story behind the music, the importance of it in society as catalyst for messages of development or warnings against AIDS, is never told.

PRETORIA - David Van Reybrouck investigates whether and to what extent Maurice Maeterlinck, so far the only Belgian Nobel laureate in literature, committed plagiarism when writing 'La Vie des Termites' (1926).