Day: September 17, 2022

TIFF22 REVIEW: Concrete Valley [2023]

Jared Mobarak

What does a doctor look like? Welcome to Antoine Bourges‘ love letter to the Thorncliffe Park apartment complex, better known as “Arrival City” considering it’s the usual landing spot for new immigrants coming into Toronto. Titled Concrete Valley and starring a mix of professional and amateur actors blurring the line between fiction and non-fiction, Bourges and co-writer Teyama Alkamli spent a lot of time with residents to help flesh out their motives and narrative in the form of Rashid (Hussam Douhna) and Farah (Amani Ibrahim), a Syrian couple who have…

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TIFF22 REVIEW: Sidney [2022]

Jared Mobarak

You’re not who you think you are. With Sidney Poitier‘s own voice providing the narrative backbone to Reginald Hudlin‘s documentary Sidney, we get to rediscover just what a wonderful storyteller he was. He speaks about his childhood in the Bahamas, his adolescence in Nassau, and the overnight culture clash of coming to Miami without realizing just what it meant to be a Black man in America with such emotion and drama that we can’t help but hang on his every word. A harrowing experience at the end of a police…

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