Concrete Valley

Rashid is a doctor, Farah is an actress, although that was back in Syria, and their life here in Toronto is different. It’s been five years already, time enough for their son Ammar to become a boy, time enough for routines to become established, although not time enough for everything to have settled; the calm and sunlight speak also of stasis. Rashid attends English classes, helps the neighbors with their medical ailments, tries to fix the boiler, while Farah works at a drugstore and has joined a local community initiative; they are together, but they are also apart. It’s not a hard existence but it’s not any easy one either, it’s even difficult to find quite the right adjective to describe it, one situation follows another and none receives greater emphasis than the others, each is unique, multivalent and ambivalent in its own way, quietly conveying a set of meanings that accumulate but don’t define. It’s like the forest that Rashid walks into at the beginning of the film and in some way he’s maybe there the whole time: silent, ominous, peaceful, detached, apart. A place of refuge, a place of reflection, a place of fear, a place that’s real. (James Lattimer)