‘Unseen’ Review: Trauma Central

metroweekly.com:

Mona Mansour‘s time-shifting drama Unseen (★★★☆☆), has lost her way, literally and existentially. She might lament that nobody knows the trouble she’s seen, but even she has taken great pains to forget.As she wakes up on the couch at her ex-girlfriend’s apartment in Istanbul, Mia (Katie Kleiger) can’t remember at all where she was last, what she witnessed, or how she made it safely from there to here.

Stranded in a limbo of memory loss, Mia tries to piece together her recent past, while also struggling to pin down why she wound up chasing danger around the globe in the first place.Directed by Johanna Gruenhut in a suitably grave production at Mosaic Theatre, Unseen interrogates Mia’s motives and her morality.

Why does any well-meaning soul leave their comfortable, privileged life to seek out, and dive into, the world’s worst circumstances — for the adventure, the paycheck, the addictive rush of risking it all for a photo?According to Mia’s editor Marian (Emily Townley), a former field photographer and a mentor of sorts, Mia’s job out there is to take photos that make people who don’t want to look, stop and look.

It’s a noble cause, but what’s the cost to Mia’s soul as she jumps from assignment to assignment — from a bombed school in Gaza to a massacre in Syria — witnessing unfathomable human horrors?