Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival

 
“It is only the dead who have seen the end of war.” This quote from Plato shadows the story of Triage, Danis Tanovic’s latest exploration of how battle alters the human heart. But unlike his Academy Award-winning No Man’s Land, this new drama follows not the soldier but the chronicler.
 
Colin Farrell plays Mark Walsh, a war photographer in the late eighties. High in the arid mountains of Kurdistan pursuing a war without borders, Mark and David (Jamie Sives) witness and capture horrendous images, from combatants pulverized by ammunition, to a doctor who works heroically to save the wounded but shoots dead those he knows he can’t help.
 
Worse, the friends begin to disagree over whether to stay or flee the chaos. Eventually they separate and lose contact, and Mark must return home to Ireland alone.
 
Triage is a slow burn, gathering more and more emotional impact as it goes. Working at the centre of this moving character study, Farrell is terrific. But it is Christopher Lee as Walsh’s therapist who is the revelation, giving perhaps his most detailed dramatic performance of a very long career.
 
Program Notes by Cameron Bailey