L'Ilya

Suicide is a touchy subject. When in the first few minutes of the film, there is someone jumping off a building, another hanging himself at home, yet another slicing her veins open, and a young man with a gun in his mouth hesitant to do it, you wonder if someone should show this on film. You can imagine that they are scenes pretty hard to watch. Off course the hand-held camera and the nice, but passive woman who documents all this for us don't help to distance ourselves from this cultural plague.

You later see the silent images of people killing themselves playing on large screens as background in a lounge. Is this art? Did we go too far? What drives those people to do this?

The writer/director, Tomoya Sato, has always had the thought of death looming over him. "I think of death all the time" he said at the special Montreal screening. He attempts to answer some questions and to take a good look at this widespread phenomenon. Restricting himself to a more personal perspective of different individuals rather than analyzing the society that harbors it, he captures the essence of this difficult subject matter. You know from the start though, that he will end up raising more questions than he will answer.

Good effort. 7/10