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Tonight I saw my first ever Toronto International Film Festival movie - the world premiere and Gala presentation of L’Enfer (Danis Tonovic). It screened at Roy Thompson Hall. We were of the lucky few who were asked if we wanted to move down from the second balcony to the 3rd row on the floor. It made the experience even better! The film was introduced by the director, producers, music composer and two of its stars, Marie Gillain and Karin Viard.

I loved it. It was a very bleak story with appropriate moments of humor. It deals with three sisters whose lives are drastically different, but are all influenced by a shared family tragedy which occured when they were children. Tanovic tells the story brilliantly through a sort of slow-release of character development. It climaxes as we see a well-placed flashback of the event which shaped each of their adult lives. Each of the sisters has their own unique dysfunctional relationships, one of which resembles the one that they had to endure in childhood.

The screenplay was written by Kieslowski and Piesiewicz, the two Polish men responsible for the acclaimed Three Colors trilogy from the mid-1990’s. L’Enfer is the second of another trilogy - not realized due to Kieslowski’s death in 1996 - which is thematically based upon Dante’s concepts of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory; Heaven (Tom Tykwer, 2002) was the first part.

Tanovic won the “Best Foreign Film” Oscar in 2002 for No Man’s Land. I haven’t seen it, but I definitely will, and soon. I loved his imagery and visual metaphors. He uses a lot of very cool camera moves to both segue between segments as well as add mood and persepective. The actors’ performances were extremely convincing, and they worked together so well, despite their very few minutes of shared screen time.

What I really like about this thematic trilogy so far is the many ways that the titles can be interpreted: we are presented with the themes before the film even starts, so it’s almost like analyzing them backwards.

One down, six to go!