Part documentary, part fiction, SMACK follows the story of three brothers (Antonio, Sybil and Zed) aged five to seven as they try to find their way in the world. Combining elements of Super-8 diary work, documentary and drama, the stories are told by actual subjects talking about their own lives and range in scope from religious transformations to heroin overdoses. The stories are funny, frightening and horrifying, but most of all, real. The brothers play out their lives through a series of minor revolutions in an effort to regain control over their world. They exercise their newly acquired autonomy in defiant ways exploring all that is forbidden (drugs, crime, abuse, etc.). Their teenage years are particularly ripe with unhealthy, criminal, even dangerous behavior. Over time, the relationship between them becomes a battle. In spite of their attempts at reconciliation their interplay is like gears in a clock - the more one moves in one direction, the further they are pulled apart.

"Smack (Steve Sanguedolce, 2000) takes Sanguedolce deeper into the tricks of biography, and further into risky terrain. For years one of the country’s most daring diary filmmakers, he ventures to smear the lines this time between real stories and made ones. Smack takes too-true stories of drugs , petty crime and generally wasted youth, and weaves them together into a story of three brothers. That’s the soundtrack. The images are another story. Smack marries its narration to a welter of scratched and hand-processed images. Tint and texture race all over the surface of the film, sometimes turning the most mundane pictures -- kids playing, a child in water, a guy prepping drugs - into non-stop, abstract canvases. This is an action movie of line and colour, with a homegrown Scarface plot burbling underneath. At times the match between image and narration is too direct for the film’s open style, but then there’s always another bit of beauty coming" .- Cameron Bailey, NOW Magazine Mar 2-8, 2000

"This fine experimental feature by Toronto avant-gardist Steven Sanguedolce uses a rhythmic montage of Super-8 movies and found footage—scratched, solarized, hand tinted—to illustrate a bittersweet oral history of three brothers growing apart. The narrator describes his dysfunctional blue-collar upbringing and his mercurial relationships with his two siblings, one of whom turned to drugs while the other turned to God, and his matter-of-fact delivery makes the stream-of-consciousness memoir of childhood games, fraternal confrontations, suicidal behavior, and crack-house encounters all the more funny and poignant. Occasionally one of the brothers chimes in, giving his version of their time together, though the sad truth often seems to lie between their testimonies. Sanguedolce manages to invert the narrative hierarchy of film by using the sound track to sustain the narrative, an uncommon feat. Also on the program is Music to Watch Girls By, a short by Christine Cynn that mines a similar vein of traumatic childhood memory but lacks the apt imagery and absorbing narrative of the longer film". - Chicago Underground Film Festival – August, 2000

"Amongst the few exceptions to the focus on female experience, the most notable was Steve Sanguedolce's SMACK, an intense transfixing canvas of hand processing and toning, accompanied by the subtle, sometimes gruesome, sometimes entertaining monologues of three brothers coping with various aspects of drug addiction. The film's psychological insights present an almost cannibalistic vision of family love in the interplay of hostility and loyalty amongst the brothers. The images work with the monologues to counterpoint, illustrate and complement the words by turns, lending a deep sensibility to the brothers' machismo. At times the adventurous toning and texturing techniques seem to strip their thick hides away, revealing a scarred frenzy beneath the skin". - Shannon Brownlee - Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto Newsletter October 2000

"Technically...as far as toning is concerned, it's very well done. I have always believed that to do excellent toning you need to start with excellent B&W photography...that is apparent here. I'm amazed at some of the incredible tones and other effects you were able to achieve, including the split toning and other colors, especially reds, which are hard to do. Perhaps you can share your processing procedures with me at some time. The story of growing up, innocence of youth, innocence lost and betrayed, addiction to hard drugs, the world of the drug addict, self-realization, determination and courage to climb out of the depths of addiction, the devotion of brothers, the 'tough love'...this is truly a heartfelt and touching account. The narration is wonderfully done. Using the tools at hand...images, psychedelic toning effects, music, the narration... this extraordinary and riveting work of art, by a talented filmmaker, recreates for the viewer the surreal world of the drug addicted. I believe this film deserves the widest possible distribution. Smack will be a controversial film: but, every teenager and every drug addict as well as those touched in some way by drugs directly or indirectly...and that's all of us...should see this extraordinary film". - Dr. Norman Weinberg, Berg Color-Tone, Inc. March 2000.