90 minutes – Drama
Festival release: September 2004 (TIFF)
Release date: October 22, 2004
Canadian distributor: Capri Films

Adapted by director Jerry Ciccoritti from Tom Walsmley’s critically-acclaimed play, Blood tells the story of brother and sister Chris and Noelle. Noelle is a sometimes prostitute who is desperate for her favorite drug after three months of parole-enforced abstinence. She is also desperate for cash. An occasional client of her favours seems to have the answer she is looking for but his particular bent is kinky threesomes. When her regular partners can’t be found suddenly her long-lost brother Chris returns. What follows is an often hypnotic dance of blurred moralities and incestuous explorations. For 90 real-time minutes the siblings push each other through often violent examinations of lusts and weaknesses spanning drugs, love, death and power. They trade control and fantasies in a debate between destroying and reconciling with the other. By experimenting with the many manifestations of love, the result is a blunt, passionate, and darkly comic look at two people struggling for salvation. Blood made its debut at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival. The 2004 Calgary Film Festival had this to say about the film: “Blood is a powerful piece of work, a probing and risqué look at moral ambiguity, right and wrong, the dangerous territory between, sex, perversion, and crime.”

Poster and still courtesy of Capri Releasing