Streets of Colour is a 2023 Australian movie written and directed by Ronnie S. Riskalla, and starring Rahel Romahn.
Streets, like the stock market or sports, always have two sides, and this time we have witnessed the bitter face of a city, perhaps like any other or perhaps unique, with its personalities and characters, focusing on the life of a shattered man who, without hope, who decides to engage in drug to escape his past, or perhaps himself.
Film Review
“Streets of Colour” is a film that confronts itself from the beginning, without disguises or half-truths. In the opening sequence, it presents the character’s conflict and tragedy, which could have happened on any other day, but destiny placed it before him one night: the murder of his friend.
Everything crumbles, everything falls apart, and his life seems irreparable, or maybe not.
Tez is a good guy, who helps elderly people cross the street (or gives them a ride) without prejudice, but not everyone in the city is like that, and he will have to confront the past, but also the present and the impossibility of escaping the reality to which he is condemned, to his origins and the local traditions of a world that tries to cling to its past.
“Streets of Colour” is a film that speaks of redemption and realities, forcing us to look directly at a character and his environment, justifying it or not, sometimes with a handheld camera in a documentary style that clearly expresses the intention of not wanting to deceive, wanting to show more than it wants to judge, and wanting to be closer to the character than to the judgment of a hostile jury.
A world where crimes are an everyday occurrence, but also sins and the impossibility of escaping their influence, always recurring and elusive.
We are facing “indie” cinema, the kind that is authentic, and this film presents itself as sincere, always avoiding easy tricks or fictional situations, allowing the action to unfold naturally, presenting itself to the viewer in all its brutality, yes, but also without gratuitous exaggerations.
This is the second film by director Ronnie S. Riskalla, following “The Day Hollywood Died” (2012), where he demonstrates his taste for realistic and difficult stories and complex, and also, difficult and ambiguous characters.
Whether it becomes a success or not, the audience and distributors will decide, but “Streets of Colour” wants to be precisely what it is: a film that seeks to demonstrate rather than judge a complex and inherent reality that exists. Whether we face it or not.
