Once Upon A Time Belgium Was Fun

Earlier this year, VICE Films and Grolsch Film Works teamed up with the directors Harmony Korine, Alexey Fedorchenko and Jan Kwiecinski to make a three-part film called The Fourth Dimension. Now, Grolsch Film Works have a new website where you can find out what they’ve been up to and read/watch interesting stuff about films. Every week we'll be plucking the highlights. This is that.

Boy, did Belgium look fun in the late 80s. With 2,000 strong super-clubs, an influx of new sounds and a tightly-knit group of DJ's working and producing at breakneck speed, you can understand why club kids were commuting from around Western Europe to sleep in cars and get shIt-faced for three days. And in the music documentary that everybody’s raving about, Jozef Devillé treats us to the experimental thrills of this very idiosyncratic electronic music movement: the Belgian New Beat.

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Three years, over 140,000 miles, a series of films, video journalism, commemorative tattoos and even a range of ‘Colonial Cocktails’ – it’s clear that the Unintended Consequences of Embarking on an Experimental Documentary Project might just be that it takes over your life. Kel O’Neill, one half of the filmmaking duo, explains this when I asked them about their Colonial Cocktails series: “It says a lot about the unfortunate level of commitment to the project, that we feel that we can’t even have a drink without it being about colonialism”.

Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill are The Empire Project’s Dutch-American filmmaking team, whose “exploded feature” looks at the human effects of Dutch colonialism, taking us from the gold camps of Suriname, to a Shabbat service in Indonesia, from pink stone mines in India, to an archetypal Dutch village on Sri Lanka’s Northern Coast and home to a community of lonely Burgher women. We spoke to them both at the documentary’s premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.

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For those who have wasted hours wishing romantic love was of the name-in-a-tree carving, Bonnie and Clyde, I’ll stick my head in an oven if you don’t love me back variety, you probably have cinema to blame. And I don’t mean the cardboard rom-com crud of ticking ovaries and he’s just not that into you. I mean real crazy love: what the French would call “amour fou”. Worlds away from being dumped on Facebook or a nasty pink Clinton’s card, amour fou celebrates the ecstasy and madness of intense emotion. To cite one of the 21st century’s great poets of the heart’s mystery, Beyoncé, in her and her betrothed’s aptly named 'Crazy in Love': “Baby I don't care/ Cuz your love got the best of me/ And baby you're making a fool of me/ You got me sprung and I don't care who sees“. Our top ten crazy lovers, in honour of the recent release of Xavier Dolan’s epic love affair Laurence Anyways, really don’t care who sees. Right on. So here’s to acting bat-sh*t crazy in the name of love.

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The one Christmas present we're excited about more than any other has to be the release (on Christmas Day in the U.S.) of Quentin Tarantino’s eagerly awaited spaghetti westernDjango Unchained.

In short, the film is about a freed slave (Jamie Foxx) who teams up with a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) to take on an evil plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio). You get the picture. Or at least you should do once you've watched this latest blood-drenched trailer.

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Keep your peepers peeled for more Grolsch Film Works updates next week. Go to grolschfilmworks.com to see what’s happening right now.