Monday, September 8--------Goodbye Solo, the latest film from New York writer/director Ramin Bahrani, has won the prestigious FIPRESCI International Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival, which just concluded this past weekend. The film makes its North American debut this evening at the Toronto International Film Festival.

I caught the press screening of the film yesterday, and I will go out on a limb and say that this is one of the best and most emotionally deep films of the Festival. Mixing an American directness with a European attention to detail, Bahrani offers a wonderously profound meditation on what seperates us, what connects us and the deep human instinct to reach out to one another. 

The film is anchored by two sublime performances. African actor Souléymane Sy Savané plays Solo, a Senegalese taxi driver living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, whose ingratiating smile and gentle manner makes him instinctively want to get involved in the personal lives of his passengers. Veteran actor Red West plays his 70-year-old passenger, a man with a dark family secret whose hard life shows in every crevice of his deeply lined face.

The relationship that develops between these two disparate characters forms the heart of this story. The taxi driver comes to understand that his passenger, who has booked him for a trip to a nearby mountain peak, is bent on suicide. So, he determines to get involved in the older man's life (despite the passenger's deep resistance) and demonstrate that life is sacred and, despite its disappointments, worth living. Savané, who is a new screen presence to me, invests so much humanity and charisma into his character that he is a delight to watch and is the magnetic core of this astonishingly well-acted indie.  

Writer/director Bahrani, who was himself born in Winston-Salem, has more than fulfilled his Someone To Watch Award promise at the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards (for his films Man Push Cart and Chop Shop) with this wonderfully mature, deeply insightful and extremely touching film. Distributors, pounce......