Black Sun

Black Sun (2005)-at Theatre Clwyd tonight, is a different type of documentary, and not an easy watch. It is essentially a "talking head" first hand story of narrator Hugues de Montalembert , who was blinded in a horrific mugging in 1978 New York, and his rather dead pan thick French accent underplays the trauma and true horror, the adaptation to sudden disability (especially to a painter and film maker) must be. Accompanied by blurred, often beautifully eerie visuals of urban New York and various far eastern countries he subsequently visited, I found the whole story interesting but certainly not moving, which surprised me. De Montalembert wonderfully captures the strange way his brain bypassed his blindness and describes the visual "hallucinations" perfectly, but his unemotional voice over deadens the whole film to the point of near boredom, and in the end I wondered just what made this man tick.

Without engaging with the narrator, you loose a certain empathy for his life. Which was a pity