Steel

By: gbelly

By: Amos Lassen

"Steel" is a story of the strong emotions that include fear and panic, self-search and isolation, love and sex, self-denial and self-discovery that Daniel encounters as he tries to find himself. He is thirty-years-old and a successful TV journalist living life in the fast lane who has fallen into a deep depression. His seemingly perfect life suddenly falls out from under him when panic attacks him to deal with himself and his past. He experiences fear, paranoia and desperation and no one and/or nothing can help. Daniel, however, won't give up: he tries to recapture what was once his by creating a second identity for himself, young ALEXANDER (19), with whom he embarks on an extraordinary journey into a painful past.

The film deals with the definitions of reality and imagination as well as illness, self-discovery and survival. We find ourselves immersed in a psychological drama about coming to terms with yourself, about growing up in difficult times and about a young man who creates his own Garden of Eden as he deals with his private hell. There is no quick way for us to find our who we are-rather it is a long and difficult journey and we see that Daniel has to take it to find out who he really is, how to love himself and how to survive in a world that won't accept failure.

This is not just a drama about a mentally ill person suffering from a general anxiety disorder and it's not just about a young man owning up to the fact that he might be different in many ways- this is a film about modern life, about a globalized world whose "values have become hollow and redundant and about a generation that has lost all sense of direction and purpose over this".