Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern's Aaltra (2004)

Aaltra is the opposite of a buddie movie because the protagonists hate each other. Furthermore, it's a very different road movie because it's played out in wheelchairs. It was the directors' first feature, and has become something of a cult film.

Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern play the unnamed characters in this film: they are neighbours, and Delépine can't stand his agricultural worker opposite, and when he motors over to his combined harvester for an argument, they both end up under the machine and lose their legs. They decide to make a spurious complaint to the head of the agricultural firm, which is the Finnish Aaltra company.

And so, saying very little to each other, they embark on a journey from Belgium to Finland, most of the time hitching a lift in their wheelchairs. They experience a little discrimination, such as a lorry driver stopping for them, then pulling off at the last moment and calling them 'enculés' ('fuckers'), but the novelty here is that these two handicapped individuals don't at all come across sympathetically, quite the reverse: they mug people as they're begging, steal an electric wheelchair, and treat a welcoming family as their servants, for instance.

But the twist comes when they eventually reach Aaltra, where they are expecting a huge compensation for their injuries: it is a very modest factory where only the handicapped are employed, and the cherry on the cake comes when the boss (in reality the Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki), in his wheelchair, takes them aside for a drink of vodka and gets them to agree to work in the factory. A great beginning for the directors.