TIFF 09: ISrael Gets Agoraphobic in PHOBIDILIA
Posted by Todd Brown at 7:51am.
Posted in Trailer Alerts , Thriller, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Middle East, Toronto Film Festival 2009.
Regev, a young computer programmer, decides to completely cut himself off from the world. After suffering an emotional breakdown in a public place, he begins to develop agoraphobia and creates a secluded idyll private kingdom of his own in which all of his needs are met: work via the internet, food by phone delivery and entertainment by television. After two years of solitary paradise in his apartment, Regev’s life is on the verge of falling apart when Gramps, a holocaust survivor who works as the building’s real estate broker, tells him that his apartment is about to be sold. Regev is neither ready nor able to give up his kingdom, and a battle of wills between the two erupts. A battle that unleashes a progressive process of personal disintegration.
Freshly announced as screening in the new City To City program at the Toronto International Film Festival, Yoav and Doron Paz’s Phobidilia looks to be rather different than what usually hits the festival circuit out of Israel. No dry post-Holocaust drama here, nor race relations nor growing up in war. No, this one verges a little bit into cyber-punk territory, tracking the life of a young man afraid to leave his apartment whose only access to the outside world is via his computer. That it’s a first step seems fairly clear from some inconsistencies in the trailer but the Paz’s have an interesting eye and a fairly unique voice for the territory, meaning that the bits that work really work. Check the trailer below the break.
remind you of anyone?
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