Hot Docs 2023 Review: After the Bridge

A documentary that would either benefit from a grander scope or further editing, Davide Rizzo and Marzia Toscano’s After the Bridge takes a sorrowful and appropriately heavy look at tragedy from a rarely examined perspective.

Bologna, Italy resident Valeria Collina had her life forever changed on June 3, 2017, after learning that her son was one of three people responsible for carrying out a rash of stabbing attacks in London. Valeria, a former actress who converted to Islam two decades prior, was shocked to find out that her son had become a radicalized jihadist capable of such violence.

After the Bridge allows Valeria the chance to relay the aftermath of such tragedy in her own words and perspective, expressing heartfelt regret and wondering in hindsight what warning signs she might’ve ignored or misinterpreted along the way. The weight of regret bears down hard throughout After the Bridge, but that’s mostly all Rizzo and Toscano’s film has to offer in terms of substance.

There’s a good amount of background detail about Collina’s life, which is nice, but there’s also a lot of padding. Observational moments that candidly show Valeria going about her day are quite humanizing, especially when put into comparison to the ways she was hounded by the media in the days following the attack, but the grace notes don’t last very long. In the place of greater depth are lengthy direct-to-camera monologues that pull from Collina’s career as a performer, and they add little more than manufactured drama to a story that’s already rife with complex emotions. Collina’s feelings are genuine, but the film itself is forced. After the Bridge would be better served either by a running time of more the 66 minutes to get into real detail about what happened, or pared down to something a lot shorter and more basic.

Wednesday, May 3, 2023 – 8:00 pm – Scotiabank 5

After the Bridge will be available to stream across Canada via Hot Docs from May 5th to 9th.