12/12/2023 - Jérôme Vandewattyne delivers a completely wild film about UFOs a psychedelic trip to the limits of reality, and beyond

After playing at the Oldenburg International Film Festival, the SLASH Film Festival, and the Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, Jérôme Vandewattyne’s second feature film, The Belgian Wave, is getting a custom-made release in Belgium on Wednesday 13 December via its own producers. The filmmaker first made a mark in 2017 with Spit’n’Split [+see also:
trailer
film profile], a fake documentary following the Liège-based band The Experimental Tropic Blues Band on tour and a real cinematic calling card that established the basis of a cinema free from all genre constraints. The adventure continues now with The Belgian Wave, a hallucinogenic cinema manifesto, for those among us who want to believe. To believe in aliens, perhaps, exploring a little known side of contemporary Belgian history when the country saw a wave of UFO sightings in the 1990s. Or to believe in other ways of making cinema a sensory experience that borrows from the psychedelic aesthetic, inviting viewers to leave behind what they thought they knew about cinematic decorum and to let themselves experience an explosion of saturated colours (and guitars), of filtered lights and dissonant sounds. 

The Belgian Wave deploys visual fireworks and shows little concern for good taste, affirming its own excessive nature as it brings us to meet Enzo (Karim Barras) and Karen (Karen de Paduwa), launched into a spatiotemporal investigation in the footsteps of Marc Vanrenberg, a Belgian journalist who had covered the famous Belgian Wave at the time. On their journey, Enzo and Karen meet a gallery of secondary characters each zanier than the next, a former nymphomaniac, a naturally shady producer, a barking notary, a dominatrix guru, and a few aliens, of course. These UFO stories evoke a whole world of pop culture references, with the film joyfully inserting itself in this mythology. The filmmaker truly reveres audiovisual artefacts of the past, displaying an almost fetishistic use of fake (or not) archival images, tapes and videos.

The story, began by Karen, seems to gradually adopt Enzo’s point of view — with his perspective, and his degree of intoxication, carrying us further and further into his foggy mind. We lose our footing with him a little, only to better let ourselves sink into his psychotropic delirium, where we meet among other strange things a human cloning sect financed by the import / export of Kombucha. At that stage, it’s better to accept, as Enzo does, that “believing isn’t rational, it’s emotional,” in order to appreciate at their true, crazy value the cheap effects that cheerfully add to this unclassifiable film, with its contagious energy and creativity. It’s not difficult to see why the jury of the Oldenburg International Film Festival gave it the Audacity Award. 

The Belgian Wave was produced by Take Five, with the support of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation Film and Audiovisual Centre, in the context of the support for light productions. The film is sold internationally by Reel Suspects.

(Translated from French)