Ruprecht

Heidelberger studierendenzeitung  Nov 21, 2005

(translated using google) 

A drug film about hope? The goal of making the Canadian director Steve Sanguedolce, a film about hope and survival is, at best expressed in the final minutes.

At first, the viewer has more than 80 minutes with the thoughts of former drug addicts deal, let the noise in her life's events. The result is a film with high artistic standards.

The four junkies Mark, Wendy, Julie and Reg report how they came to the permanent use of hard drugs. Unhappy childhoods, brutality and domestic violence, sexual abuse, early pregnancy, unhappy marriages - these are the basic ingredients for the path in the dependency.

The drug as a rebellion, the first shot, the eternal nightmare. "I was not a happy junky," Wendy confesses at the outset. Every day, they said they would stop tomorrow. But it was always tomorrow. And Mark says over 15 years he's wanted to break the vicious circle.

In choppy scenes, the viewer sees the narrator's life go by. There are mainly black and white images, sometimes - in metaphorical moments in which no actor can be seen - is mixed with colour.

The stories are all real and existed before filming starts in interview form. The narrators were willing to describe their lives with all the breaks and low points for the documentation. This made the director of the pictures, he has turned on a 16mm film, but it then developed to 35 millimeters. This operation gets the film a highly unusual action, occasionally remember the pictures of early silent films.

One of many unorthodox methods that contradict everything you learn in film school knows Sanguedolce. But the results speak for themselves.

The chaotic, fast and colorful images are badly scratched, bring some futuristic, psychedelic impressions and then add back in the form of the visual chaos of action. Has unanimously pronounced the music that is perfectly arranged and turn the film into a work of art can be.