In Memoriam Guido Convents (Lummen, 10 May 1956 – Leuven, 10 September 2025)
The Belgian film historian Guido Convents, an early member of Domitor in the 1980s and 1990s, has passed away at the age of 69. We have lost am amiable, friendly person, a passionate lover of cinema, and a fellow researcher with whom one could have great talks in a café.
During his professional life, Convents worked for the Office Catholique Internationale du Cinéma (OCIC). He collaborated in particular with institutions in Africa, where he curated film programmes, among others. The OCIC, founded in 1928, is now part of the World Catholic Association for Communication SIGNIS, which organises courses and conferences on media literacy in more than 120 countries to help people all over the globe to develop a critical attitude towards film, radio, television, and digital media. Before his retirement in 2017, Convents regularly served as a juror at international film festivals. When traveling abroad for his work, he employed his spare time to do research on the relation between the church and cinema in local archives and libraries whenever he could.
Guido Convents had studied anthropology and history in Leuven and Lisbon. As a film historian he was renowned for his research on early cinema. He published a book on the origins of cinema in the former Belgian colonies, A la recherche des images oubliées. Préhistoire du cinéma en Afrique, 1897–1918 (Brussels: OCIC, 1986), with a follow-up twenty years later: Images et démocratie. Les Congolais face au cinéma et à l’audiovisuel (Kessel-Lo: Afrika Filmfestival, 2006). For his PhD dissertation he researched the beginnings of cinema in Belgium, which led to the publication of his seminal study Van kinetoscope tot café-ciné. De eerste jaren van de film in België, 1894–1906 (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2000; available online here). In this impressive volume he also discussed the larger historical background, as he was particularly interested in how cinema and visual culture were shaped by their social and political contexts.
He was fascinated by African culture and travelled there regularly. In 1996 he was one of the founders of the Afrika Filmfestival in Leuven, which he directed until 2024, using his international network to bring films to Belgium. In 2003 he wrote a volume on colonial propaganda and African cinema, L’Afrique? Quel cinéma! (Antwerp: EPO; Flemish version Afrika verbeeld. Film en (de-)kolonisatie van de geesten, Berchem, Brussel, Leuven: Africalia, EPO). He was also the author of an almost 700-page long history of cinema in Mozambique, written in Portuguese: Images & Realidade. Os Moçambicanos perante o cinema e o audiovisual. Uma história política-cultural do Moçambique colonial até a República de Moçambique (1896-2010) (Maputo: Dockema; Leuven: AFF, 2011). Convents was among the pioneers of research on non-western cinema.
As a journalist of OCIC he wrote numerous articles for, among others, Cinemagie, Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis, and Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. He acted as editor of OCIC’s Cine & Media (later SIGNIS Media) and CineMag, which he had founded in 2018. Here he published on his third field of interest, the relation between the Catholic Church, its mission work, and media. Unfortunately, he could not realise his plan to write a book on the history of OCIC and SIGNIS. But he successfully fought to preserve the archives of these organisations. He wrote to me in a mail: “I have been able to save six tons of archive materials from OCIC-Unda and SIGNIS before they were destroyed. Everything went to KADOC.” The Catholic Documentation Centre at Leuven University keeps all sorts of material related to activities of the Catholic Church, among which a vast collection of optical lantern slides.
In 2021 he wrote to me about another book project: “In two months I will continue writing my new book on cinema in Belgium 1894-1918 – volume 2, 1908–1914, and volume 3, 1914–1918.” Sadly, due to his illness he did not have the time to finish the manuscript.
Sabine Lenk