Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

At first sight, Thomas Lindsey, a travelling salesman, is the most ordinary man in the whole world. He tries to make the best of his cheerless existence and seems to believe in the sales patter with which he tries to get money from naive people in the American backwoods. Despite knowing better, he continues to pursue a sales campaign for the fake product Wellness, an obvious pyramid construction. Most unusual is his obsession: collecting wasps’ nests. When Lindsey sees his mission of working his way up to some kind of wealth thanks to Wellness doomed to failure, he succumbs like a beaten dog to everything that happens to him. The viewer is a witness to his inevitable downfall bordering. By turns hilarious and almost impossible to watch, Jake Mahaffy’s remarkably sensitive, razor-sharp satire is a genuine low-budget film. The shooting, in the town of Warren, Pennsylvania, took only seven days. The inhabitants of Warren, none of them professional actors, played almost all the roles. The film is not a documentary, but was shot as one, which provides an unusually realistic effect.

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