TIFF ’12: ‘Dead Europe’ Trailer

This year’s Toronto International Film Festival seems to filled to the brim with promising, quality films and you can add Dead Europe to that ever-increasing list. Directed by Australian Tony Krawitz (Jewboy and The Tall Man – the documentary) and starring Ewen Leslie, Marton Csokas and Kodi Smit-McPhee, Dead Europe, set in Australia and Greece, appears to be a gripping tale a man discovering the sins of his father and the curse he has put on his family.

Here is the official synopsis from the film’s TIFF page:

After exploring a shocking incident of racially motivated brutality in his feature documentary The Tall Man (which played at the Festival in 2011), Australian director Tony Krawitz returns with this brutal, unsparing allegory of generational guilt. Adapted from Christos Tsiolkas’ controversial and critically acclaimed novel, Dead Europe boldly dredges up the buried histories of a much-bloodied continent as it explores one family’s shameful secret.

Celebrated Greek-born Australian photographer Isaac Raftis (Ewen Leslie) has been invited to Athens to oversee an exhib-ition of his work. While Isaac is eager to see the homeland that his parents left behind decades before, his family is violently opposed to the idea: his mother warns of a family curse; his alcoholic father Vasili (William Zappa) refuses to talk about his former life in Greece and has vowed never to return. When Isaac ignores his father’s final warning, Vasili drunkenly takes off in his car and dies in a terrible crash. Grief-stricken but undeterred, Isaac goes to Athens with his camera in hand. But a heated encounter with his European relatives, a drug-addled trip to the village where his father once lived, and a recurring encounter with the apparition of a young Jewish boy lead Isaac to wonder if there is indeed some truth to the notion that his family has been cursed by some unspeakable evil.

Shot on location in Athens, Paris, and Budapest, Dead Europe plunges deep into the squalid underbelly of a continent riven by centuries of irrational hatred and violence. The film takes on a deranged, dream-like quality as Isaac is drawn deeper and deeper into his family’s suppressed history: chance meetings with figures from the past become more bizarre and violent, sexual encounters more depraved, and the photographs he takes with his ever-present camera more cruel and exploitative.

As Isaac gradually uncovers the horrifying truth behind his family’s flight from Greece, it becomes clear that the blood-soaked sins of the father are the sins of Europe’s history — the sins of an entire people against the powerless, the disenfranchised and the unwanted.