Film Archive

The Brand New Testament

Horizons 2015 / Le tout nouveau testament / Luxembourg, France, Belgium 2015

God is alive and he’s in a Brussels apartment devising a malicious plot against humanity. Well, there’s nothing left for it: his innocent and, as yet, unknown daughter will have to rebel against Him by finding six new apostles. In his playfully surrealistic comedy, director Jaco Van Dormael returns to filmmaking in top form.

Synopsis

And on the first day he created Brussels. All at once, the grey city comes to life with giraffes and ostriches, but the real fun begins when God introduces a somewhat shabby-looking Adam – perhaps because Van Dormael’s God is no athlete or thinker: on the contrary, he looks a bit like a caricature of a down-and-out barfly. He sits at his computer in a dirty undershirt, smoking and drinking and taking perverse pleasure in human suffering. One day, however, his ten-year-old daughter runs out of patience and uses daddy’s computer to send every mortal his or her day of death. She then flees the family nest in order to find six new apostles. The Brand New Testament is a wellspring of Van Dormael’s typical fantastic ideas and other hallmarks: a story told from a child’s perspective, the tangible presence of death, and the conflict between fate and free will. Van Dormael combines these factors with precision camerawork to create a fresh cinematic spectacle.

Šimon Šafránek

About the film

113 min / Color, DCP

Director Jaco Van Dormael / Screenplay Jaco Van Dormael, Thomas Gunzig / Dir. of Photography Christophe Beaucarne / Music An Pierlé / Editor Hervé De Luze / Art Director Sylvie Olivé / Producer Jaco Van Dormael / Production Terra Incognita Films / Coproduction Climax Films, Après le déluge, Juliette Films, Caviar Antwerp / Cast Benoît Poelvoorde, Yolande Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, François Damiens / Sales Le Pacte / Distributor Aerofilms

About the director

Jaco Van Dormael (b. 1957, Ixelles, Belgium), screenwriter and director, made his first feature after chalking up several remarkable shorts (e.g. L’imitateur, 1982, and E pericoloso sporgersi, 1984): Toto the Hero (Toto le héros) was an immediate success, winning the Caméra d’Or for best debut at the 1991 Cannes fest. Five years later, Van Dormael once again scored at Cannes when Daniel Auteuil and Pascal Duquenne shared Best Actor for portraying the leads in The Eighth Day (Le huitième jour, 1996). His 2009 conceptual sci-fi movie about the last mortal on Earth, Mr. Nobody, was shown at Karlovy Vary. The Brand New Testament premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at this year’s festival in Cannes.