Attenberg

Born and raised in an abandoned mill town, uniformly built around a single high-rise apartment building , Marina (Ariane Labed) has fallen in love with a failed architectural experiment and forgotten all about the people who were supposed to live in it.

Built sometime in the sixties, Attenberg was never meant to harbour human warmth in the first place. Its sole purpose was to procure obedient workers for the nearby aluminum factory, offering a colorless life to go with the regulation outfit. Hardly the stuff dreams are made of. The only romance that ever blossoms amidst the white-washed walls of this ghost town is of the fleeting variety, here now and gone tomorrow, as Marina’s promiscuous friend Bella (Evangelia Randou) would readily attest to.

The only long-standing engagement is the one between Marina’s father – one of the project’s leading architects – and the city. Eternally bound to his concrete mistress, he now follows her down the spiral, as his cancerous innards are decaying in synch with the building’s ancient plumbing. No wonder his daughter never learned how to love. And the only man who could ever teach her – a handsome stranger in town for business – might have entered her life a little too late. Will Marina follow her father down the path of destruction, or will she break free of the asphalt and concrete jungle that is her home?

Conjuring magic from graceless slabs of stone, Athina Rachel Tsangari turns the remains of this industrial community into her own private Stonehenge – a cross between ancient burial ground s and an enchanted monument. Or perhaps the town is just the breeding ground for an endangered species, like the ones Marina loves to watch on the wildlife channel. The only difference is these ones are plagued by post-industrial loneliness. And it appears to be fatal. –TIFF.net