Trailer Premiere: Concrete Valley

Rashid treats a handful of patients free of charge, and the family scrapes by on the salary Farah earns working as a clerk in a pharmacy. Bourges, whose family moved to Canada from France when he was a teenager, cowrote the screenplay with Teyama Alkamli, a filmmaker and Syrian immigrant. Most of the crew, for that matter, was not born in Canada, “and we all related in some way,” Bourges tells Zeahaa Rehman in Toronto Life. “In the back of your mind, there’s this other place where you could have been. It’s this imaginary parallel life that you kind of go back to in your mind. To some people, it’s a joyful thing; to others, it’s frustrating. It keeps some people from being in the moment—it really impedes their lives. That was the feeling that I was interested in capturing.”

Concrete Valley is “an oblique, deceptively placid study of the emasculation of exile,” writes Mark Asch at the Playlist. “The undertones of its low-key drama eventually harmonize into an urgent and nuanced consideration of the desire to be useful—it’s a study of restless masculinity forced into a lower, more passive status and the question, left open-ended, of what Canada has to offer new immigrants beyond charity.”