Unspeakable Act, The

Seventeen-year-old Jackie Kimball lives in an idyllic old house in Brooklyn with her widowed mother, her younger sister Yolanda and her brother Matthew, one year her senior. The family sees good relations between siblings as entirely natural, except that Jackie is too fixated on her brother. She gets distressed when Matthew brings back his first serious date to meet the family. When her brother leaves home for university, Jackie’s neurosis just gets worse. She receives a little help from a friendly therapist, but she essentially has to deal with her situation in her own quiet way… In his subtle psychological film, screenwriter, director and film editor Dan Sallitt employs unusual tact to treat the theme of incest. His sophisticated method of directing probes deep inside his characters, despite the apparent emotional inertia of the images; the latter, however, conjure up a spiritual charge similar to what we might experience in the works of the masters of direction: Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)