[UNSEEN screens
Saturday April 2nd at 11:15 a.m., Sunday April 3rd at 6:20 pm, and Monday April
4th at 12:10 pm at the Cleveland International Film Festival.]
Review by Bob Ignizio
UNSEEN is not
your typical true crime documentary. It doesn’t wallow in the morbid details of
the murders committed by Clevelander Anthony Sowell, nor does it waste much
time or effort in trying to suss out what might have motivated his acts of
violence. Rather, it focuses on the victims, in particular those who survived
their encounters with Sowell, and the ways in which an environment rife with
drugs and poverty made it easy for police to dismiss both the women who went
missing never to be seen alive again, and those who escaped and tried to seek
help from the system to no avail. It adds a further dimension of horror to a
story that was pretty horrible to begin with.
