Concrete Valley

Sensitive and finely calibrated, with shades of Robert Bresson and Angela Schanelec, Concrete Valley is the latest film by Franco-Canadian filmmaker Antoine Bourges.

The follow-up to his much-admired and singular 2017 feature Fail to Appear, this similarly understated drama is a wrenching examination of human connections within little-seen corners of contemporary Toronto.

At the centre of the film is Rashid (Hussam Douhna), a former physician from Syria who has settled in the area of Thorncliffe Park with his wife, Fahra (Amani Ibrahim), a former actor, and their young son. Struggling with his current position in life and seemingly eager to escape his marriage — while still guided by a sense of social solidarity for those around him — he proves himself a man capable of bitter derision and gaslighting as often as generosity and support.

With exacting and spare compositions by cinematographer Nikolay Michaylov (Anne at 13,000 ft, TIFF ’19), Bourges wrings a sort of resistant and luminous beauty out of the traditionally uncinematic spaces of offices, legal buildings, and high-rise apartments, interspersed with striking exterior sequences shot in and around the nearby verdant ravine of its title. Scripted in collaboration with writer Teyama Alkamli and featuring mostly non-actors from the community it portrays, Concrete Valley avoids narrative clichés around the immigrant and refugee experience.

Instead, the film offers a complex character study within a larger and at times contradictory image of care. It’s a concept that takes on different forms, operates at varying degrees, and can be withheld as often as it is offered altruistically, be it for a family member, for a neighbour, for the planet — not to mention for one’s self.

ANDRÉA PICARD