London River

RACHID BOUCHAREB
Algeria, France, UK, 2009, 90 minutes, Color

Winner of an Independent Jury prize at this year's Berlin Film Festival, London River follows Elisabeth Sommers (Award-winning actress, Brenda Blethyn), a farming woman with a simple rural routine. When her regular calls to her city-dwelling daughter go unanswered, she travels to north London where she is caught in the hustle and bustle of the city, just after the July 2005 bombings. As she continues to search fruitlessly for her daughter, the unfamiliarity of her daughter's predominately Muslim neighborhood begins to unsettle her, and fear sets in. At the same time, Ousmane (Sotigui Kouyaté) has traveled from rural France to London to search for his son, also missing since the attacks. Ousmane and Elisabeth meet by chance, but it soon dawns on them that his son and her daughter were roommates, maybe more. Blethyn gives her best performance in years and the great Malian actor Kouyaté, who won Best Actor at the Berlin Film Festival, contrasts her quivering concern with grave calm. Rachid Bouchareb, the Franco-Algerian director of Days of Glory, directs this intimate story with tenderness and surprising hope. London River is a film where the everyday collisions of cultures produce not only conflict, but also possibility.-Toronto International Film Festival

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