Toronto Pictures' "Dead Love" Crosses Dimensions of Life, Love, Death...

Premiere Issue (P. 14)

By Jane Delson

Life is transitory. Love is transcendent. In Toronto Pictures' new short film, "Dead Love," we learn this lesson through the interactions of two young acquaintances, whose encounter crosses the dimensions of life, love and death.

Visionary filmmaker Bruno Pischiutta's films are noted for their use of introspective, probing dialogue to unearth his characters' innermost feelings. From angst to ecstasy, he pokes and prods at his characters' respective frailties until they ultimately reveal to us their most private musings.

In "Dead Love," a couple in their early twenties - "Kate" (Christina Macris) and "Jeff" (Gabe King) - meet by chance encounter when Jeff is escaping from a friend's party that he finds unsettling. Walking late at night in a nearby cemetery and pondering why his friends don't offer him any sense of camaraderie or real companionship, Jeff is startled by Kate who appears spontaneously from behind an aged tree.

They exchange pleasantries, and Jeff inquires about Christina's presence in the cemetery, noting it is an odd place to take a walk alone at night. She counters that he is hardly in a place to ask that question, as he is doing the precisely same thing. Suddenly, they begin to share the mutual pleasure and solace they find in the stillness of the old town graveyard. When Jeff offers that he has begun to find it an effort and a “burden” to try and get along with his college-aged peers, Kate expresses empathy, noting that it's better being alone than enduring meaningless relationships.

She serves up numerous innuendoes that lead us to suspect she has become an apparition and is not the animated and very lively Kate we first encountered in Pischiutta's introductory scenes. Speaking about her own life and relationships in the past tense, she piques Jeff's curiosity and confusion, as he picks up every oddity in her syntax and questions her about them.

More revelatory conversation ensues between the two young people, and Kate shares that she has seen Jeff walking alone at night very often. He queries how she might have seen him, when he has never spotted her and - little-by-little - she informs him that she is, in fact, a ghost, having died in a recent car crash at the hands of their mutual friend who was driving recklessly.

Needless to say, Jeff is stunned by this shocking revelation. But rather than dismiss Kate as "crazy," he quietly takes in the seriousness of her speech and somehow manages to find credibility in her emphatic statement that she is truly a ghost. He is even undaunted, seemingly mystically drawn to continue conversing with Kate.

When Jeff confesses to Kate that he finds her attractive and asks if he can meet her again, they acknowledge that the dimensions of time and space should literally be keeping them apart. But Kate tells Jeff the story of an elderly woman who, though remarried, still visits the grave of her first husband every week and talks to him to find comfort and peace. She explains to Jeff that it is clear they are communicating at some spiritual level, and that the transcendent language is Love. For Pischiutta, that message is eloquent enough to impart, and his film finds quiet closure as Kate and Jeff agree to meet again in the cemetery the very next evening.

Toronto Pictures hosted the premiere screening of its new short film "Dead Love" on July 6, 2005, at the John Spotton Cinema in Toronto, at the National Film Board of Canada, where it received great approval from its opening night audience. D

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