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Two years after it was first screened at the Toronto Film Festival, "The City" has been slowly making its way across America and now into Europe. It's been worth the wait, too, as it's a very effective (if also a very sparse) story which, takes a faceless mass of people and connects us to them and their problems.
And such problems... "The City" is divided into four stories that each follow a different set of characters who are linked chiefly by their having come to New York for work. It takes bravery to head off into the unknown like this, especially when in some cases these people are the first of their families to try, yet when they arrive they are each treated as lowlife.
The stories are each about scrabbling for work, for rights, for acceptance. Each shows basic rights being ignored and the heartbreakingly real moments where the individual can be treated badly because the group fears to intervene.
Nicely, the four stories don't quite conclude: they have definite endings but they are not the clean-cut déenouements that you might expect from short story films. It means that each one, separated by a device of a photographer taking portrait snaps, feels as though it segues into the next and avoids a stop/start feeling as you readjust to the next story.
The slightly open endings also mean that this feels like a genuine slice of life rather than a scripted story and that's patently intentional as the whole filming style is documentary-like with black-andwhite film and a handheld look.
The film is in Spanish and English, with English subtitles.
