This Beautiful City

Colour, 35 mm
Canada, 2007, 87 min
EP – European premiere
Section: Forum of Independents

Synopsis

Husband and wife Harry and Carol are having a dinner party with some friends. Afterwards, Carol goes to have a smoke on the sly on the balcony and teeters over the railing. A moment later she is found injured below by a policeman named Peter, a drug-addicted prostitute named Pretty and her boyfriend Johnny. Carol’s fall opens the film and the rest plays out three months later with the event having intersected the fates of the five protagonists from modern Toronto and caused them to intertwine. This impressive Canadian film offers a plainly shot, grim tale, told with Canadian sobriety. It speaks of disturbed relationships, the neuroticism of the modern world, the loneliness and desperation of the people in it, and the day-to-day madness of human existence. Structured with sophistication, the film contains a number of suggestive scenes so impressive as to burn them into one’s memory. It is composed of high-strung segments often charged with action, sudden jump cuts, quick flashes, and imaginative use of sound and music.

About the director

Ed Gass-Donnelly (b. 1977, Toronto) is an acclaimed theatre director and short-film maker. This Beautiful City is his feature film debut which he himself moreover produced, wrote, directed and edited. The story comes from one of Gass-Donnelly’s own plays. In his own words, Gass-Donnelly likes to take inspiration from the stories of ordinary people forced into extreme circumstances. His short films have included Pink (2003), Pony (2002), Polished (2002) and Dying Like Ophelia (2002). He has directed a number of music videos for independent Toronto bands such as the FemBots, who also composed the score for This Beautiful City. The film was screened at the festival in Toronto, among others, and won the Best Actor and Best Actress awards for the performances of Aaron Poole and Caroline Cave at the Canadian ACTRA awards.