In Alain Berliner’s The Wall (Le Mur, with English subtitles), the year 2000 approaches in Belgium, a country of 10 million in a territory about the same size as Maryland. Although Belgians were ruled for nearly 1,800 years by conquerors, including Rome, the Franks, Burgundy, Spain, Austria, and France, then handed to Holland in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, and fought a war of independence to establish a constitutional monarchy by 1830, they are still divided. Dutch, spoken with a Flemish accent, prevails in the northern part of the country, whereas French is spoken in the southern part, known as Walloonia. Most government business was conducted in French until a couple of decades ago, when the country’s administration was divided into three zones (monolingual Flanders, monolingual Walloonia, and bilingual Brussels), but the enmity between Flemings and Walloonians remains, as we see in the early part of the film when a Flemish woman exits from the car driven by a Walloonian. We next see reporters asking the government what they plan to do, as the political parties representing the Flemish and Walloonians are deadlocked and cannot form a government for months, but the politicians tease the reporters by saying that a solution, then under discussion, will be found. A happy-go-lucky French-speaking proprietor of a fried potato wagon in Brussels, nevertheless, goes about his business as if politics played no role in his life. He attends a New Millennium party along with a Flemish woman, and they both fall asleep. When they awake, it is January 1, 2000, and a wall has been built between the Flemish and Wallonian parts of the country. Our hero, the Walloonian potato vendor, is on the Flemish side without a visa, in danger of arrest; he can travel without a visa anywhere in the European community but to Flanders. When he finds a way through the wall, his girlfriend is subject to the same fate. The film provides a worst-case scenario of where the country is heading, but the reception of the film in Belgium unfortunately has not been to see the wisdom of the message according to Berliner, who discussed the film at a UCLA screening on June 8, 1999. MH