The Black Guelph

Synopsis

Canto is thirty years old, actively dealing drugs while suffering from mental health issues when his girlfriend Leah, kicks him out. Leah sick of his antics and his criminal lifestyle tries to shield her daughter Rachel from Canto's negative influence. Canto is forced to turn to the streets for help as he always has done. Dan, Canto's father comes back to the area and tries to reconnect with Canto, who outright rejects him for abandoning him when he was a child.

Dan then begins to become somewhat of a surrogate father to Virgil who he meets outside a derelict industrial school where Dan is rough sleeping. Virgil lives alone with his mother Beatrice on a barge. Dan and Beatrice become entangled romantically, two addicts seeing both their own reflections in one another and internal motivation to find peace. Canto's drug debts to a local enforcer are piling up and a game of cat and mouse ensues, survival hangs in the balance.

This film is inspired by Dante's Inferno and the seventh terrace of lust. The symbolism of unresolved sexualised trauma permeates down through the generations and flows deep within the psyche.

A single act of violence perpetuates another and the original sin, a case of childhood clerical sex abuse, creates a domino effect where the fear of intimacy and human connection is handed down by father to son. The seventh terrace of Dante's inferno will only free the suffering soul when they are brave enough to let go of fear, lust and their ego. One is just to speak with sincerity and integrity, allowing honesty to pass from one's lips to offer compassion to another's ear.

This simple act of humanity casts out the inner demons, but conversely what isn't said also becomes the root of a never-ending and self-perpetuating cycle of intergenerational despair. The origins of such long forgotten, what isn't said ultimately becomes the symptom...

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