Leo

On his way home from celebrating his 30th birthday party Leo and his girlfriend Amanda are attacked by two strangers. He helplessly watches as his girlfriend gets shot in the course of the altercation. She dies in the hospital shortly afterwards. His powerlessness and incapacity to deal with the loss lead him to an increasingly pressing need for vengeance. His friends try to calm him down, but in the end they get drawn into Leo’s fanatical retaliation campaign. Following the principle of reduction, the director traces the phenomenon of powerlessness and the spiral of hate, without following conventional patterns of victim and perpetrator psychology. Leo, the victim of a blind act of violence, slowly comes undone. His attempts to cope with his helplessness, his hate, and his longing for revenge are doomed to failure and consequently lead to catastrophe. Despite its explicit representation of violence, the film avoids a lurid approach and always cuts the scene short as soon as the spectator can guess what would happen next. Josef Fares’s film makes a contribution, without compromise and at the same time eminently political, to current debates about violence.
Gabriela Seidel