Toronto Film School’s Class of 2010 Film Production graduate Zain Duraie has chosen to portray the difficult subject of mental health in her first feature, Sink, which was nominated for the Sutherland award at this year’s LFF. With a world premiere at Toronto’s TIFF in September, the subject matter was all the more intriguing and challenging for the award-winning shorts filmmaker as it attempted to highlight the effects of mental health on a Middle Eastern family of four living in Jordan. Although set and shot in Jordan, the heart-breaking situation is a global one that translates in any language.
Sink (Gharaq) follows the deteriorating mental health of high-achieving high school senior Basil (Mohammad Nizar) who has a breakdown during a lesson and is subsequently suspended for an altercation with a teacher. Mother Nadia’s (Palestinian actor Clara Khoury) bond with her eldest appears the strongest of her three children as she tries to reach out to him after his behaviour becomes more erratic. As she becomes increasingly fearful for the rest of her family and its safety, that includes husband Jalal (Wissam Tobaileh), sporty and sociable younger son Amer (Anton Qasir) and primary-school aged daughter Dima (Tara Al Rifai), Nadia struggles to navigate her troubled son’s undiagnosed mental illness with harrowing consequences.
Duraie’s clever use of different aspect ratios (from letterbox to widescreen) to represent the mood of the moment, like a character feeling ‘boxed in’, is coupled with Four Daughters cinematographer Farouk Laâridh’s light and colourful, to dark and subdued tones, that include a playful mother-son bonding session in the swimming pool, to distressing and claustrophobic scenes of Basil having manic episodes.
Added to this, Duraie’s script which she admits in interviews was rewritten from each character’s perspective before the final draft, often lacks dialogue in favour of close-ups of Nadia or Basil’s expressions that, for example, include the subtle agony of trying to figure out each other’s next move, or a fear of the unknown, or an ultimate cry for help. It accumulates in an absorbing and powerfully nuanced performance from Khoury and Nizar throughout. The whole affair relies greatly on superb acting from all the cast, including Tobaileh as a father bravely trying to accept the social stigma in such a traditional environment.
As anyone who has experienced helping a loved one with mental illness, there is a decisive scene where Nadia believes she is reconnecting with Basil at a local park, again resulting in a muddy, joyous and playful episode between mother and son – that equally raises concerns about Nadia’s own mental well-being, that results in the status quo reverting back to the earlier situation, as Nadia loses her son to his own demons in the dense fog of mental illness. It is both tragic and highly realistic in this emotionally laden film, where the impact of losing a child to this illness is so raw that it feels much like a bereavement. What keeps Nadia – and Basil – going is a mother’s unconditional love which the very end scene demonstrates, striking a heart-wrenching chord between mother and child.
As a project based on someone very close to Duraie, she painstakingly curates every frame and emotion with the upmost care, allowing Sink to come from a true place of reality and personal anguish.
