Dead Europe 2012

Dead Europe 2012
1h 24min | Drama | 14 December 2012 (UK)
Storyline:
A young photographer transporting his father's ashes from Australia to Greece comes to learn that something sinister happened in his family's past involving a young Jewish boy. Despite an effort to distract himself with a mix of random sex and drugs, Isaac's world begins to unravel as he realizes that he cannot escape the ghosts of the past.
User review:
Christos Tsiolkas' 2006 novel "Dead Europe" was a chilling tale of a young Australian photographer bringing his father's ashes back to his native Greece, where he begins to have some otherworldly experiences. Being Jewish, gay, and of Greek descent, the Aussie author weaves his own sexual and spiritual beliefs into the character of Isaac to craft a thoroughly believable narrative that resonated with readers worldwide.
Turning this award-winning book into a movie involved a set of serendipitous circumstances, as director Tony Krawitz explained in the Q&A following the screening here in Toronto. He got a call from his producer Liz Watts, telling him about a book by an Australian author that would make a good motion picture. In fact, Krawitz had just read Tsiolkas' novel a month earlier but Watts had no idea. It was one of those rare moments that could only be labeled "fateful." Adapting the book for the screen was the next challenge. Louise Fox, a hugely successful writer of over 100 Australian television movies and series episodes, was called upon to craft the script. The resulting film is a triumphant followup to director Tony Krawitz's 2005 feature debut "Jewboy." The picture contains some of the same frightening thematical elements as in Stephen King's novella "Apt Pupil," which director Bryan Singer turned into a controversial feature film in 1998 with Ian McKellan and Brad Renfro. But in "Dead Europe" the atrocities of World War II, most notably involving the treatment of Jews and gays, combined with Eastern European traditions of curses and mysticism, produce a much more chilling narrative a la Hitchcock and Serling than the Singer work with its notorious but subtle homoerotic undertones. Krawitz takes the paranormal aspect a giant leap further, along with a more overtly sexual storyline, resulting in an unflinching, often painful examination of one man's sad descent into the present-day horrors still being visited upon Europeans today, ostensibly as a result of their (and/or their descendants') past actions.