In contradistinction to the first word of its title, Antoine Bourges’ CONCRETE VALLEY opens in a forest. Initially, it appears unpeopled, inhabited instead by trees, shrubbery, and unseen cicadas, who fill the air with their eerie hush. Then, a man appears, walking through the foliage. He finds a path, stops, and stares. While his contemplation of the location suggests wayfinding, we learn later this figure—the film’s protagonist Rashid (Hussam Douhna)—was simply going for a walk; he wasn’t lost, but wandering.
To begin, a few facts: Thorncliffe Park, the immigrant community in Toronto where the film is set, is not a park per se, despite green spaces that include a portion of the city’s 11-square kilometre Don Valley ravine system. The Thorncliffe Park stretch of the Don is indeed a "concrete valley", with apartments and parking lots towering above the Parkway that snakes through the dense woodland. In the 1950s, the area was developed into Toronto’s first high-rise neighbourhood. Today its residents speak Arabic, Bengali, Greek, Urdu, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Gujarati, Spanish, and Tagalog, among several other languages. These of course include English, which Rashid is studying.
But whatever facts I give you, hardly any of them seem as important as the feeling of compassionate ambivalence Bourges’ film achieves. Less a sociological, political, or historical document, CONCRETE VALLEY instead offers a softer, more contemplative portrait of the individuals comprising a fragile family unit: Rashid the father, Farah the mother (Amani Ibrahim), and their son Ammar (Abdullah Nadaf). The story is mostly Rashid's, told through his strained perspective as a former physician from Syria, just five years after immigrating to Canada.
Their relationship runs the whole arc of the film, veiling a thematic concern for something closer to solicitude than cinematic romance.
Here is what is important: the blue crawfish Farah and Ammar find on a walk, Farah’s past work as an actor impressing itself upon her vision of the future, the family using a towel to soothe a fire alarm set off by baked eggplant, the lack of hot water in their apartment that serves as a repeated, guiding motif.
In other words: details, details, details. Like Rashid as he surveys the forest, the film is as much a narrative as it is a portrait in miniature—of people, of a place, of a moment in time. Perhaps this explains an undercurrent of somewhat awkward agita in the film, experienced through protracted stares and silences. Nowhere is this more obvious than the scenes between Rashid and Farah, a couple whose bond seems to be cracking in no small part due to the lack of communication. Their relationship runs the whole arc of the film, veiling a thematic concern for something closer to solicitude than cinematic romance.
What are they all doing with their lives? And why? Or, as his friend asks Rashid, “What do you believe in?” “I don’t know how to answer that,” Rashid responds, before the film cuts to the next scene. Non-answers, asides, and uncertain pathways are this film’s accomplishment, eschewing received immigrant narratives. In no obvious way it reminds that immigrants have desires which exist beyond the Canadian state’s multicultural imaginary.
She clearly hopes for a job with them, that ever vague notion of “opportunity”, but what, if anything, might be available to her remains opaque and uncertain.
While a scripted narrative—written by Bourges and collaborator Teyama Alkamli—CONCRETE VALLEY’s characters are mostly played by non-professional actors. Sparse and observational in style, at times almost cinéma verité, the effect is a film so real it can feel unreal. Such hyperreality is further achieved through a soundscape that emphasizes the ambient sonic landscape of the city. “Cinema is such a great place to hear that because, in our daily lives, all of our senses are so stimulated that we often don’t hear it,” Bourges said in an interview in September 2022. “Even when we’re not wearing headphones, we’re still not necessarily aware of or listening to our environments. I think there’s an interesting contrast between being a spectator and being a filmmaker. As a viewer, you can just sit for 90 minutes and experience life in a way that real life doesn’t allow you to—visually but also aurally.”
But what the propulsive, constantly buzzing frequency of urban life belies are the vagaries of self-determination and the complex, at times compromised acts of individual agency undertaken to achieve a sense of fulfilment in zones of constraint. The characters of CONCRETE VALLEY aren’t ever really seen leaving the neighbourhood of Thorncliffe Park, and in fact seem to desire a deeper connection with it. Rashid, sometimes portrayed as powerless, offers informal, mostly unsolicited doctor’s visits in his building, treating patients for free through what he calls in English, a “natural therapy”. Meanwhile, Farah takes time off from her job at a drug store in order to volunteer with a community organization. She clearly hopes for a job with them, that ever vague notion of “opportunity”, but what, if anything, might be available to her remains opaque and uncertain.
Meanwhile, that background hum builds and builds, like a welcome balloon waiting to pop, as Rashid and Farah’s marital strife produces a sustained and near-inescapable sense of disquiet. Towards the film’s end the suggestion of a (sexual) transgression, which might lead to an awaited rupture, instead produces a temporary attenuation. After mismatched arguments, small confessions, and subtle barbs traded between the couple, the film pauses for a moment laden with something other than resentment, in a brief and likely final moment of soft spontaneity.
Tiana Reid is an assistant professor in the Department of English at York University in Toronto, Canada.
