Vancouver filmmaker Antoine Bourges's Concrete Valley explores displacement and unease
New feature follows an immigrant Syrian family, with an entire cast of non-actors and an eye for “the weird pace and unexpectedness of real life”
Concrete Valley captures the feeling that life has been temporarily suspended.
Concrete Valley.screens at VIFF Centre from August 25 to September 1. On August 25 at 2 pm, director Antoine Bourges hosts an introduction and Q&A
THE FILMS OF Antoine Bourges are quiet, unfussy, almost aggressively plain. His personal arc is anything but.
Born in Paris, the teenage Bourges came to Montreal in pursuit of a professional hockey career, studied business at McGill University, ended up working as Jeff Wall’s assistant in Vancouver, and eventually, seemingly out of nowhere, arrived as one of the most intriguing new voices in Canadian cinema.
His first film, a quasi-doc from 2012 called East Hastings Pharmacy, is what you might expect from a European casting a distantly compassionate eye on an ailing Vancouver. Bourges followed in 2017 with the festival hit Fail to Appear, which told the very slight story of a social worker and her client with such deadpan affect that it almost spilled over into absurdist comedy.
There’s no such ambiguity to Concrete Valley, opening Friday. Observing an immigrant Syrian family in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood, the film is pervaded by a sense displacement and unease, an ambient impression, perhaps familiar to Bourges, that life has been temporarily suspended.
Antoine Bourges
“There’s a feeling of, not being lost necessarily, but like you’re not fully there,” he says, calling Stir after the film’s premier in Montreal. “Maybe it’s a general new immigrant experience, but it’s a feeling that there’s this other life that you could have lived and another you’re not living, and it prevents you from being present in the life that you have.”
This is certainly true for Rashid, once a doctor, now unemployed and listless in his newly adopted home. Chief among the film’s triumphs is the performance of Hussam Douhna, a non-actor who manages to project a universe of emotion through the tense figure of Rashid.
“You have to cast ‘ready-mades’,” says Bourges, who drew his performers from the neighbourhood depicted in the film. “And it’s not like Hussam is an angry person, but the spine of that character in some ways is similar to the spine that I perceived on first impression. When you spend a lot of time with him, he’s actually very friendly, very generous, and totally not the kind of guy that Rashid is. But I know that he can give off this impression, effortlessly, and I feel that I was trying to help him stay in that mode when we were filming.”
Bourges and his minimal crew made Concrete Valley over 40 days, which might sound luxurious, but with an entire cast of non-professionals—including Amani Ibrahim as Rashad’s wife, Farah, and Abdullah Nadaf as his son, Ammar—a lot of time was allotted to “teaching people this job that they’ve never done and that’s incredibly hard”. It’s no slam on Fail to Appear that it feels almost gimmicky in contrast. Filled with unresolved moments and microscopic mysteries, Concrete Valley gradually assumes a rhythm that feels closer to nature. It’s a tighter synthesis of technical skill with the filmmaker’s particular desires as a storyteller, which align with the ‘slow cinema’ of filmmakers like Chantal Akerman or more recently Kelly Reichardt. It’s also worth noting that, rather conspicuously these days, and maybe like most guys who started out on skates, Bourges didn’t come to the profession as an encyclopedic cinephile.
“I always liked movies but I felt like there was something missing,” he says. “These dead moments or the way events unfolded, the weird pace and unexpectedness of real life. When I rewatch my films, I see they are part of a tradition where the filmmaker gives a lot of space for the audience to feel for the characters. And maybe sometimes it can be cold. Some people read it as a Canadian distance, some kind of very Anglo-Saxon thing. It doesn’t come from that place but because it’s married to a Canadian setting and the Canadian texture, the weird alchemy of it make it feel like that. And that’s fine with me, but it’s just coming from an aesthetic preference in how to experience a character’s emotions. You know when you watch an Ozu film, and the characters are always smiling when they’re talking, even when they’re sad, and you’re like, ‘What are they thinking?’ As a French person, when I moved to Canada, it was hard for me to gauge what people were really thinking or feeling. But I like that in movies!”
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