In October 2024, Montreal's Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC) hosted an electrifying cine-concert by Jérôme Vandewattyne and Séverine Cayron. The two multidisciplinary Belgian artists presented One Way Ticket to the Other Side, a hybrid project blending a collective film with a live performance at the crossroads of psychedelic rock and punk cinema.

One year on, the couple return to Montreal with a Belgian fiction feature selected in the Temps Ø strand: Summer Hit Machine, directed by Vandewattyne and featuring Cayron in one of the lead roles. The pair are also behind the original score for Incomplete Chair by Japan’s Kenichi Ugana, whom they met only 12 months earlier, again at the FNC.

This trajectory illustrates how the Montreal gathering acts as a nimble, human-scale platform for talent. Encounters morph into concrete collaborations thanks to the foresight of professional facilitators such as Julien Fonfrède, one of the festival’s programmers.

“I’ve been making music and films since I was 15, and I’ve never asked anyone for permission,” says Vandewattyne, a Belgian counter-culture figure and the man behind Spit’n Split [+lee también:
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After discovering this singular project, Fonfrède invited them to perform at the FNC as part of the 20th anniversary of the Temps Ø section. The cine-concert swiftly became the talking point of the festival: “We arrived with our suitcases and instruments without realising the impact it might have. Even a year later, people here are telling us they had never seen anything like it.”

Among the audience members was Ugana, the prolific Japanese filmmaker noted for Visitors (2023) and Extraneous Matter (2023), who was deeply impressed by the duo’s performance. He asked to meet them: “He’s very polite and didn’t approach us directly after the show,” recalls Vandewattyne. “Julien [Fonfrède] acted as a go-between, and Kenichi simply said: ‘I’d like you to compose the music for my next film.’”

That project swiftly became Incomplete Chair (2025), a punk satire about a designer obsessed with creating the “ultimate” chair from human bodies – a film blending gore with characteristically Japanese black humour.

The artistic chemistry encouraged by the FNC culminated in a double presence at the 2025 edition, with both Incomplete Chair and Summer Hit Machine delighting audiences in Temps Ø barely a year later. It’s an opportunity for Vandewattyne to stress, “It all started with the festival. It’s a unique space where creators can be daring. Julien has that punk mentality – he shows films that no one else would dare to show at a general-audience festival, and he shows them to everyone. At the FNC, I’ve never heard the word ‘niche’ - either from audiences or from professionals.”