THE MIRACLE OF LIFEA bio-ethical horror movie for the whole family... 18+
Written and directed by Yves Sondermeier, Joel Rabijns
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SpECIFICATIOnS
Country of production: Belgium / Germany
Completed: 2013
Duration: 83m08s
Color
Language: English (with English subtitles)
Sound: Stereo
Available screening formats:
-DCP
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
24fps
-Quicktime Apple ProRes 422
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1 (2596x1080)
or 16:9 letterboxed
25fps
For preview purposes screeners (online or DVD) are available by request.
You can get in touch with the filmmakers by e-mail: [email protected]
or by phone: (+32) 487 533935 (Yves Sondermeier) or (+32) 497 028691 (Joël Rabijns)
THE MIRACLE OF LIFE themiracleoflife.net
THE STORY
In short:
A living placenta searches for his place in a hostile society, as he is raised as a human, a
christian, a soldier.
Synopsis:
In a twisted world, Marianne gives birth to a rather unusual child. While the child is born dead,
life finds its way trough the afterbirth. Marianne decides to raise her placenta as a normal
human being; as a young man named Luke. Behind his monstrous facade, there is revealed a
person of intelligence, faith and sensitivity.
Luke struggles for his place in a world of drunks, junkies, whores and bodybuilders. An
insane world that treats him as a freak.
As this hostile society slowly pushes him towards the edge, Luke has to choose between holding
on to his gentle ideals or becoming the merciless soldier his mother always wanted him to be.
BACKGROUnD
Not neatly fitting into the categorizations of mainstream festivals and cinemas, The Miracle Of
Life is slowly gathering a small but devoted cult following through word of mouth.
The film can perhaps best be described as a body-horror comedy. Although hardcore horror
fans, coming-of-age-story enthusiast and retro fetishists will all encounter elements that they
know and love, The Miracle Of Life will dodge their expectations, rather choosing to dive into
a highly artificial but meticulously crafted trash-world of its own. A colorful re-imagining
of an American Dream that has only been experienced second-hand, through the highest and
lowest shelves of the video store.
THE MIRACLE OF LIFE themiracleoflife.net
THE MIRACLE OF LIFE themiracleoflife.net
Breastfeeding the placenta.
Marianne leading a guerilla military funeral for her husband.
Luke on his first date with Rihanna, the self-proclaimed ultimate wet dream of the local high school.
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Street trash attempting to rape Marianne the muscle mother.
Luke sitting by the side during gym class.
Will even the Good Lord turn His back on Luke?
THE ATTRACTIOn
A public screening of The Miracle Of Life is not unlike a sideshow-attraction. Usually some of
the cast and crew members (bikini babes, wrestlers, etc) will be present to spice things up. We
also recommend serving (free or pay-what-you-want) popcorn in our official multifunctional
popcorn and vomit bags.
If transportation allows it, we provide a funky popcorn machine and all ingredients ourselves.
The audience loves it.
Other side-activities in the past have included live weightlifting contests, slime-brewing
workshops, exclusive poster/prop/videotape sales and even a quiz with one of the movie
placentas as the first prize.
As a form of crowdfunding, the filmmakers are offering an exclusive VHS prerelease edition
of the film, limited to 100 copies, through the website themiracleoflife.net
The nostalgia factor of VHS (quite prevalent in the eighties style cover art), makes it an ideal
format for offering the film in a physical form to its early supporters. All gathered funds are
used for festival entry fees and other ways for the
film to find its audience.
Juicy details to look out for are the umbilical-
cord-numbered label on each individual tape and
a bonus g-string from the actual film, worn by
Marianne, the bodybuilding mother.
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CAST
PASCAL MAETENS as Marianne the iron-pumping feminist-without-a-cause
KAREL VINGERHOETS as Father Julio Gritty
CéLINE VERBEECK as Angie, the friendly prostitute
JéRéMIE PETRUS as Francis the deranged white trash teenager
ANDREAS PERSCHEWSKI as Harry the friendly horny bum
MICHAEL FROMOWICz as Bill the retarded horny bum
SOFIE HOFLACK as Rihanna the manic prom queen
RENATO BRABANTS as the diabolical dr. Ford
KOEN BLAUWBLOMME as Michael the beautiful baseball bully
LORD CHRIS BALE as Reggy the frightened wrestler
GERT JOCHEMS as Mr. David the fetishistic ornithologist
CREW
Written and directed by JOëL RABIJNS and YVES SONDERMEIER
Art direction and costume design by zOë VERMEIRE
Cinematography by YVES SONDERMEIER
Original music by YURI LEWITT
Prosthetic visual effects by PèRE OBHSCURE
Digital compositing by JOëL RABIJNS
Editing and post-production by JOëL RABIJNS and YVES SONDERMEIER
Animated sequence by LIESBETH EECKMAN
Make-up by LOUIzA VANDEWOESTYNE
ABOUT THE CAST
PASCAL MAETENS is a frequent collaborator of directors Rabijns and Sondermeier, starring
in several of their short films, including the sci-fi movie Blue Dead Fish (2011) and seizure film
Perverse Conclave (2011).
KAREL VINGERHOETS has been prolific in Belgian motion pictures, television and theater
productions for more than 30 years, with Hasta La Vista (2011) being a recent silver screen
appearance.
CéLINE VERBEECK made her debut as the title character in Suske & Wiske: De Duistere
Diamant (2004), film adaptation of a long running comic series. Another notable feature film
appearance is De Laatste zomer (2007).
JéRéMIE PETRUS has made appearances in several French language television and film
productions, notably appearing alongside Caterina Murino in the epic miniseries Odysseus
(2013).
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ABOUT THE DIRECTORS
YVES SONDERMEIER (1984) was raised by an art and music critic married to a protestant
priest. He grew up in a small town in West Germany.
After finishing several degrees in piano-building and -tuning, he pursued his calling to become
a filmmaker and started to work on super-8 footage.
Meanwhile, living in Belgium, he started studying Audiovisual Arts at the Royal Academy of
Arts in Ghent, Belgium, graduating with a Bachelor degree.
He worked together with the Belgian comic duo Kamagurka and Herr Seele, creators of
“Cowboy Henk” and several Tv shows.
His first short documentary about the artist Mathieu HA was selected for the International Film
Festival Gent in 2009. The space short film Blue Dead Fish was selected at the Independent
Spirit Film Festival in LA in 2012.
Filmography:
-2005 Marianne (45min)
-2009 Amneci Mathieu HA (11 min)
-2010 Buy Illusions (11min)
-2011 Blue Dead Fish (22 min)
-2013 The Miracle Of Life (83 min)
JOëL RABIJNS (1986) was born and raised in Hasselt, Belgium, a small town near the German
border. After briefly working as director/editor/animator of scientific video’s for one of the
country’s leading universities, he moved to Ghent in 2008, to study Film at the Royal Academy.
There, he made movies with balloons as the main characters, as well as short scientific
documentaries about respectively dinosaurs and Egyptian mummification. These projects were
well-received by audiences, which encouraged Rabijns to further explore strange cinematic
dreamscapes, in all their technical extremes. From sleazy trash aesthetics to hyper-edited
seizure compositions.
The experimental short Perverse Conclave was selected at the ISFF Hamburg.
Filmography:
-2009 Balloonmen (approx. 20m)
-2010 DinosaurPunk (10m)
-2010The film of the book of the Lord of the Secret House (14m)
-2011 Perverse Conclave (35m)
-2013 The Miracle Of Life (83m)
THE MIRACLE OF LIFE themiracleoflife.net
THE MIRACLE OF LIFE themiracleoflife.net
Actress Céline Verbeeck with directors Yves Sondermeier and Joël Rabijns.
INTERVIEW WITH THE DIRECTORS (translated from Dutch)
Why did you decide to collaborate on a graduation project?
We’ve worked together several times in the past. Actually our previous short films were produced
in close collaboration. Throughout that process we discovered a number of similarities, both
regarding our production methods, as well as our common cinematic influences. Originally
we were planning to individually shoot two separate films that would be produced with each
other’s help, until a mutual friend suggested; why not make a film together. When we asked her
what sort of movie that should be, she replied spontaneously: “a sort of horror film, starring a
placenta”. It started out as a joke, which we laughed about for a long time. The concept spoke to
our imagination and every day new potential scenes popped up in our heads. The characters and
the world they inhabit, that grew spontaneously and intuitively, offered countless possibilities.
About six months later we had to decide what we’d do for our graduation projects. Two short
films or one feature; it didn’t take us long to decide. The concept, as well as almost completely
carved out characters, already existed.
Why did you choose English as the spoken language?
Because, in our perception, the Dutch language just isn’t very cinematic. It is most suited for
poetry and literature, but for moving imagery it’s too soft. Especially for the kind of film we
wanted to make. Also, we believe our film is made for a niche audience, a very specific scene, of
which only few members live in Belgium or the Netherlands. By using the English language
we’re simply able to reach a wider range of people.
It’s clear though that most of your actors aren’t native English speakers. Isn’t that a problem
for you? Don’t you think that’s a turn-off for your audience?
Surely there will be people who will have trouble with that. But we didn’t put too much thought
into it during the shooting period. And to be honest, we think it’s rather fitting for the film’s
concept. We never wanted to make an American film. Rather a film that’s being told in a
European way, but adopts the design of the American independent, or trash, film. The world,
or the universe, that we’ve created within our film, is set in a indetermined place, somewhere
in the western world. It could be anywhere and nowhere, but the world in which Luke lives
is completely Americanized. Everyone seems to want to behave like a movie character from
Hollywood. The dialogues are strewn together oneliners, no one acts natural and everone
appears to be a bad copy of himself or of some prefabricated stereotype from 80s/90s popular
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INTERVIEW WITH THE DIRECTORS
culture. This wouldn’t have worked in Dutch. We’ve decided to work with an international
cast, in order to have as many different accents as possible in the film. For example, Francis,
Luke’s only childhood friend, talks with a heavy French accent, while Bill and Harry, the bums
who live in front of Marianne’s apartment, have a thick German accent (in Bill’s case even
with touches of Polish and Czech). We didn’t try to hide their accents, but rather used these
to emphasize that language isn’t that important in the film. Often in Europe, the larger scale
commercial film productions attempt to copy American cinema in order to please an audience
that has been spoiled with spectacle films. This simply doesn’t work. We wanted to play around
with that idea and turn a disadvantage into an advantage.
You mentioned overlapping interests from film history between the two of you. Where
do you find inspiration and how do you explain the similarities between both of your
respective influences?
We both grew up in the late 80s, early 90s with the VCR. The video stores seemed to provide
endless archives of weird “trash films” that both of us loved to consume when our parents were
out of the house. This has left a considerable mark on each of us. Now, twenty years later, we
still consider these films to be hidden gems and every time we rewatch them, we can still enjoy
their unpretentious lightness. For both of us it has always been a dream to make a film in that
vein. A film however, that would have a little bit more going for it than a regular trash film. A
sort of malicious, fun meta-film. However, it had to be a meta-film that doesn’t want to force
you into thinking too much about this meta-aspect (but simply leaves room for the viewer to
read that aspect into it).
How can you succeed in making an unpretentious meta-film?
By putting everything you tell and show in perspective by using humor. You know, not taking
yourself too seriously. Or in other words, by not forcing the meta-aspect into your film as a
carefully orchestrated goal, but to accept it as a pleasant side-effect. We didn’t want to make
a film by filmmakers for filmmakers. We had to keep it entertaining and universal for the
audience. If you don’t see the meta-layer it will still remain entertaining. At least we hope it
will. [They laugh hesitantly]
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INTERVIEW WITH THE DIRECTORS
What exactly is your approach then, and what separates your film from other recent films
that toy with these genres?
Indeed, at the moment there are some filmmakers, especially in the USA, who work with these
genre films and, so to speak, make exact remakes of them, only with huge budgets. I other
words, they copy the starting points of existing films and try to improve upon them using
resources that weren’t available to the creators of the original material. What these people,
in our view, often fail to grasp, is that the beauty of the old trash films comes mainly from
their low production values, and that each image breathes the engagement (blood, sweat and
tears, for lack of other resources) of the filmmaker, even though you’re not aware of this as a
normal consumer. We rather wanted to make a film that would be produced in this spirit. For
two reasons. A, because we have great admiration for films that are realized in this way and B,
because it wouldn’t otherwise have been possible to finish it as a feature. So it isn’t a film that is
deliberately made in the form of a B-movie, with enormous budgets, which would make it feel
insincere, but it’s an actual B-grade production. A second important issue is that the themes we
address in our film differ from most old trash films and their current reimaginings. The genre
or the form offers an enormous freedom to create beautiful things with limited resources.
You do end the film with a very offensive scene, which will, especially in Belgium, hit a
sensitive spot. Aren’t you worried about the reactions?
The final scene in the film is certainly offensive and we still don’t really know how we feel
about it ourselves, but we consider that to be a good sign. Nowadays everyting is laughed with
unconditionally and we’re not entirely sure if that’s a good thing. Things that, a few decades ago,
would have provoked public protest and action in the streets is nowadays only being addressed
on the stages of stand-up comedians. Daily abuses in politics and society are being laughed away
under a guise of anything-goes, usually with some obscene humor thrown into the mix. We find
this phenomenon questionable. So, even though we make elaborate use of this ourselves, we do
also want to question it. Throughout the film, the degree of cynical humor keeps increasing, up
to the point where it becomes unbearable, irresponsible even. We hope that, at this point, our
viewers will ask themselves if the 70 minutes they just witnessed have actually been funny, or
rather very sad.
After our sound designer had seen the film for the first time, he said: “You confronted me with
a side of myself I didn’t want to be confronted with, I feel really dirty about myself laughing
with that stuff. A sort of wacky catharsis; only switched, you know what I mean?”
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INTERVIEW WITH THE DIRECTORS
We do want to make clear that, at the time of writing the scene in the hospital, neither of
us thought specifically about Kim de Gelder (who murdered several young children in a
kindergarten in Belgium in 2009, and stood trial only a few months before The Miracle Of
Life was completed in 2013) and newspapers weren’t writing about it at all. This man or his
actions were in no way inspiration for the ending of our film. The fact that his trial took place
recently has the unfortunate consequence that people will make certain associations because
the collective memory is still very fresh. Our film ends the way it does because it made perfects
sense as the next step within the (psycho)logical evolution of the story and the character of
Luke. So we hope the viewer will not link recent real-life events to our film, and will rather
interpret the scene the way we intended it, in the context of the rest of the film. We’re aware
that in the next few years this won’t be the case for many viewers from Belgium and we’re
prepared for the worst of criticisms.
So underneath all the craziness there’s actually a more “serious” layer. Was that your
intention when you wrote the story?
No, our intention was to make a fun film and have a good time. We wanted to create a film/
script/story without self-censorship. It had to be fun and “pleasantly shocking”. A film that we
would love to see ourselves. Since we both have a rather cynical and not-too-optimistic world-
view, that did sneak in, but we certainly didn’t consciously work towards it. I’d like to quote
Michael Ballhaus here: “Alles was man macht ist eine Wiederspiegelung dessen was man selbst
ist und in seinem leben mitgemacht hat”.
Will the future bring more Rabijns & Sondermeier works, or will you guys be going separate
ways now?
[Speaking English]We had the time of our life. So why stop it. [They apologize for the English,
explaining that when they have the opportunity to drop a one-liner, they won’t hesitate to.] It was
a really fruitful experience.
Is a next concept in the works or would you rather not talk about it yet?
We currently have a first draft for a film that will be titled “American Juice”. We hope to start
shooting a year from now. It will be a sort of vigilante blaxploitation film, that we want to make
with the same kind of mentality and humor. The main character will be equally surprising as
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INTERVIEW WITH THE DIRECTORS
the placenta in The Miracle Of Life.
How should I picture this “mentality” you mention?
[Speaking English] It’s gonna be the same pumped up nonsense wackiness. Probably produced
without any money.
[Joël] Because we’ve got the balls to do the job. [Yves] Somebody got to do it, right? If you want to
make the ultimate film you got to be willing to pay the ultimate price.
[Laughing]
And there’s that self-aware sort of humor you mentioned.
[Joel wipes a tear from his eye] Sorry, we always wanted to say something like that in an interview
and since you’re the first one to ever interview us, you are the target.
For a moment there I wasn’t so sure whether you were being serious or not.
THE MIRACLE OF LIFE themiracleoflife.net
THE MIRACLE OF LIFE themiracleoflife.net
Exploitation-style artwork for the novelty VHS release.
FUN FACTS
-For the voice of Luke, the directors initially tried to approach John Hurt as well as several
Michael Jackson impersonators.
-During a preview screening at the Sphinx cinema in Belgium, audiences were, for the first
time, offered popcorn in custom-made “popcorn and vomit bags” by one of the wrestlers
from the film and actress Sofie Hoflack (as her Rihanna character) in an originally designed
bikini. This promotional stunt broke the theater’s 25 year no-popcorn policy.
-The dog playing Laika died of old age between shooting days. The script was rewritten for
Laika to be beaten to death by Marianne. The dead dog seen in the film is a combination of an
actual cadaver and parts of a modified Samson doll (from a popular Belgian children’s show).
-Each copy of the first film poster is hand-printed using the “placenta print” technique, an
arts and crafts concept for young mothers, where the placenta (still covered in the mother’s
blood) is used as a stamp. The result is a Rorschach test like image. For the film poster, the
actual baby Luke puppet is used as the stamp.
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