SPEAK UP! IT’S SO DARK

A highly topical, fictionalized account of an acutual case, Suzanne Osten's drama creates a fascinating psycological study of the current rebirth of Fascism in Europe. Soren is a young Swede who lives in the skinhead's world of booze, heavy metal music, and attacks on “foreigners”. Jacob is a Jewish psychiatrist whose relatives were killed in Auschwitz. Theirs is an uneasy relationship, powerfully chronicled from their first chance meeting on a train after a skinhead fracas, for which Jacob tends to Soren's physical injuries, through their explosive and revealing psychoanalytic sessions, where Soren's psychological scars are explored. Etienne Glaser (star of Osten's “The Mozart Brothers”, 12th CIFF, 1988) interprets the role of Jacob with a gentle intensity as a man who, in spite of his rage and frustration, begins therapy with the boy in the privacy of his own home. Simon Northon plays Soren with a terrrifying truthfulness; self-hate unmasked, devoted to-and horrified by-his raging hatreds. A cinematic tour-de-force, SPEAK UP! IT'S SO DARK is an absorbing tale of truth telling, confrontation and possible reconciliation.-Kit Kalfs. In Swedish with English subtitles.