​Andree Ljutica’s film celebrates resilience and the will to rebuild

There are a number of factors that make Seven Hundred Fifty-Six remarkable. There’s the closeness we feel to former prisoner Leah Faria - a combination of her own powerful personality, a filming style that’s intimate without being invasive, a meditative pace with loving attention to mundane detail, and undoubtedly CASEY director Andree Ljutica’s ability to gain his star’s complete trust.

Leah herself is a wonderful and charismatic presence: a kindly, purposeful figure marching through a bleak, grey New York in a puffa jacket and woolly hat with her wheel-along toolbox servicing first aid stations across the city. As we see her heading out into the cold again later to host a support group for women, we wonder at her seeming tirelessness and the joy she takes in everything she does – the theme at the heart of this story.

Designed by Eli Cohn nocturnal Sounds, most of the audio is ambient – street noises, machinery, a rock band practising in a room upstairs – and this increases the feeling of being immersed in Leah’s life. A very subtle, haunting score by Rob Frye is used sparingly and to enormous effect.

That lightness of touch is echoed in the film’s structure. For most of its 18 minutes, it’s a slow-paced, albeit completely engaging, journey through Leah’s working day – dingy dispatch office, wintry streets, the bus, the ferry, a spooky deserted theatre. Dialogue is minimal and perfunctory. Then, around twelve minutes in, the film changes tack in a beautiful and unexpected way as Leah’s character opens up.

A sensitive and deeply moving study of an exceptional woman as she builds her life again after years of incarceration, I could have watched this all day.