Blind Sun

If you are into fast action and high adrenaline movies, then maybe you will think that this one is not for you...and do not get me wrong, I thought I was one of these people too, until I came across Blind Sun. You owe it to yourself to watch it till the last minute...it does change something in you.

This movie is a real thriller, unlike any horror tale, that keeps you continuously alerted and at the same time makes you realize how close we are to facing such issues on a global scale.

Excellent movie, with an exceptional cast and director...you really feel the heat.

Good atmosphere until you get bored, very beautiful filmmaking, an interesting POV, but doesn't deliver.

In the end, it's just another artsy film with less to say that it's director thinks.

Water as precious as gold! It's not a new idea and it might be quite a reality in a future not so far... BLIND SUN begins with this premise. In a remote region of Greece a strong heat wave make portable water a precious thing. To reinforce that idea there's a multinational company, which distributes water to the population, called "Bluegold"! The two elements, heat/fire and water are constant in the movie, as they represent two main forces of life! And healthiness... including psychological healthiness...

The heat wave and the lack of water are just the plot background to what truly is a psychological thriller and a perfect slow burner! In fact BLIND SUN is a mystery thriller where the pace is really slow and many scenes are almost contemplative (look at those beautiful landscape shots and that sunshine!) but the tension is growing scene by scene in a slow but effective way!

The characters aren't many, it's all around ASHRAF, the main character, and about what he sees and thinks... we "see" the plot through his mind... but it's not easy to understand a mind affected by extreme heat and thirstiness...

To sum up BLIND SUN is a mystery thriller with a great cinematography (nice camera details and beautiful scenarios) and a (very!) open ending...

Blind sun is as close to a thriller as Wong Kar Wai's "2046" to a sci-fi movie (which it is, but hey!). It is surely 'old school', if only for the high quality. To me, Blind Sun is all about the sun- sterilized atmosphere. The settings are unsettling: useless luxury that becomes a burden. I felt the space capsule isolation. Think of The Shining, Alien or even more the Cube. None of the horror, though. The angst comes from the urge to return over and over to a hostile chamber (to survive or to be doomed?). The sun is hostile, water is a dangerous precious (everything but purifying), the secondary characters seem to have all a dual nature: mundane and symbolic, walking antonomasias of who they are. From universal, to stereotyped, to grotesque. They may as well exist without a given name. In this visually amazing picture I found the pace very different from the cinematography I am getting used to lately. Here the film plays in 1970 terms, like an early Peter Weir or a gore-less Fulci (a hint of the latter accidentally suggested by an occasional hairdo). Every frame is deliberately beautiful, but it is a bitter beauty, the sort you experience smelling wild herbs. To take it in, you will breath deeply and then you might find yourself totally into the story like a compassionate but helpless passerby, or the opposite, obliviously distanced from the scene like this sun. This sun is a fierce star and this Earth is a planet with a toxic atmosphere and with an impossiblé gravity; returning to the infested capsule really seems the only way to buy time. A past hardship that is not even hinted at is immediately inferred, and makes the unthinkable almost tolerable.

A slow burn. I dare say it because here it's not a metaphorical cliché, it's the actual plot of this indie!

Set in Greece in a near dystopic future, we follow Ashraf Idriss (Palestinian actor Ziad Bakri), an immigrant hired to house-sit a villa for the summer, ensuring its safety amidst rising hooliganism and brutality whilst personally suffering the oppression that attempts to counter the tense lawlessness of a heat-wave-baked world increasingly deprived of its primary resource: water.

Sure enough, the standoffish Ashraf faces increasing threats, scared to be in the villa and afraid to act after having lost his papers to a racist cop, but what's a real menace and what results out of a slowly baking brain?

Told through careful cinematography, editing, and sensibility that lean towards art-house minimalism, this first-time feature for Joyce A. Nashawati marks this Lebanese director as someone possessing tremendous flair for the deeply nuanced yet sharp socio-political allegory, the kind that lets one get away with more style then story.

The horror classification given by some (see Shudder.com) is believable. The menace that looms throughout genuinely takes hold midway and brings us to chilling moments, both of real fear and psychological unease. There's an unsettling atmosphere that reigns, set both by an intriguing soundtrack and a keen exploitation of light in establishing either the threat of a sun-drenched world or of those lurking in shadows.

A tense, unnerving visual treat with a disturbing end, my only complaint is that it's often too easy to forget just how water-deprived and hot a world Ashraf faces and it's never quite justified why he seems to suffer more than all. Watching his "burnout" is engrossing, but we never fully embark on his ride that leads to his solution, albeit we certainly do feel his relief afterwards (up to a point) for, though he's hardly the most likable and pet- friendly of fellows, he does earn our sympathy.

Well worth a watch!