MAD Solutions Acquires ‘Concrete Valley,’ About a Syrian Family Living in Toronto, in Multiple Territories (EXCLUSIVE)

MAD Solutions has acquired the distribution rights to “Concrete Valley” for multiple territories. The film focuses on a Syrian family living in Toronto.

The film, from Canadian-French filmmaker Antoine Bourges, premiered at Toronto Film Festival, before travelling to Berlinale, and it just screened at Jeonju.

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The deal covers the following territories: UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Palestine, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritania, Djibouti, Somalia, Sudan, South of Sudan and Comoro Island.

The writers are Bourges and Teyama Alkamli. The producer is Shehrezade Mian at Markhor Pictures.

“Concrete Valley,” which mixes fact and fiction, focuses on a Syrian family in an immigrant refugee neighborhood in Toronto, with people from the community cast in the film. It continues Bourges’ exploration of the intersection of fiction and documentary and his focus thematically on the many ways people fall through the gaps in society and its institutions.

The film centers on Rashid (Hussam Douhna), a doctor from Syria, who struggles to adjust to his life in Canada after five years in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park nighborhood with his wife, Farah (Amani Ibrahim), and son Ammar (Abdullah Nadaf). He tries to hold on to his old identity by working as an unlicensed doctor for his neighbours.

While Farah becomes more involved in their local community, tensions between her and Rashid begin to take their toll on their fragile marriage.

Bourges comments: “What came to interest us in the characters of Rashid and Farah are the difficulties they face in their efforts to maintain both their relationship and sense of self. Couples are the ultimate relationship with the other, and we were fascinated by this idea of authenticity, of finding oneself in a new place while navigating this shared identity. The question then is not how can we stay together, but how can we change together? It felt like this neighborhood offered a particularly evocative site to explore this question.”

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