Parky At the Pictures (23/10/2026)

(Reviews of Five Seconds; and All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea )

FIVE SECONDS.

The son of a Sicilian policeman, Paolo Virzì developed a love of literature during his Livorno childhood before studying under the great screenwriter, Furio Scarpelli at Rome's fabled film school, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. A number of shorts and features from this period have seemingly disappeared. But Virzì returned to directing after serving his writing apprenticeship in the 1990s and won both the David di Donatello and the Nastro d'Argento awards for Best New Director with La bella vita/Living It Up (1994).

Following the Best Film Donatello for Ferie d'agosto/August Vacation (1995), Virzì won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival for Ovosodo/Hardboiled Egg (1997). He further bolstered his critical reputation with Baci e abbracci/Kisses and Hugs (1999), My Name Is Tanino (2002), and Caterina va in città/Caterina in the Big City (2003). The historical comedy, N (Io e Napoleone)/Napoleon and Me (2006) was followed by Tutta la vita davanti/Your Whole Life Ahead of You (2008), a dark ensemble satire that won the Nastro, the Globo d'oro, and the Ciak d'oro for Best Film.

Having returned to Livorno to profile singer Bobo Rondelli in L'uomo che aveva picchiato la testa/The Man Who Hit His Head, Virzì racked up 18 Donatello nominations (winning three) for La prima cosa bella/The First Beautiful Thing (both 2009), which also won four Nastri. Further acclaimed for Tutti i santi giorni/Every Blessed Day (2012), Virzì bagged another mammoth Donatello haul when Il capitale umano/Human Capital (2013) converted seven of its 19 nominations, including Best Film. He reunited with

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi for La Pazza Gioia/Like Crazy (2016), which amassed 17 Donatello nominations, with the Best Film and Best Director wins being matched at the Nastri.

Virzì next paired Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren for The Leisure Seeker (2017), which was filmed in English in the United States. Back home for Notti magiche/Magical Nights (2018), he embraced the commedia all'italiana style before fashioning the dystopian drama, Siccità/Dry (2022). He even produced a sequel, with Un altro ferragosto/Another Summer Holiday (2024), before collaborating for a fifth time with actor Valerio Mastandrea on Cinque secondi/Five Seconds (2025). Showing in London this weekend under the auspices of CinemaItaliaUK, this is Virzì's latest attempt to assess Italian society through the eyes of a complex and, sometimes, contradictory character.

Seeking sanctuary from his troubles, Adriano Sereni (Valerio Mastandrea) has gone into hiding in the stables at Villa Guelfi. He braves the Tuscan snow to collect groceries from the nearby town, but he refuses to allow anyone to fix an electrical fault in person, as he wants to be alone. Much to his frustration, however, a mini-bus full of twentysomethings arrives and camps out at the rundown villa. They start tending the vineyard that has been left to moulder and Adriano learns that the blonde leader of the group is the Countess Matilde Guelfi Camaiani (Galatea Bellugi), whose grandfather had owned the villa in better times.

Adriano receives a visit from his lawyer, Giuliana (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), who tries to bring him up to date with the court case he is striving to ignore. She also tidies him up before he has a conference call with his partner and staff to announce that he is quitting his law firm forthwith. His surly mood is not improved when Matilde drops by with a box of produce and he realises that he is stuck with her, despite having signed a rental agreement that would guarantee him seclusion.

One morning, Adriano takes the train to Rome and walks into the courtroom, where he is being tried for the involuntary manslaughter of his 17 year-old daughter, Elena (Caterina Rugghia). The judge (Giancarlo De Cataldo) notes that he is being represented by the inexperienced Maria Pesaresi (Anna Ferraioli Ravel), while the prosecutor is Eugenio Cimarosa (Lorenzo Balducci). He also clarifies that the case has been brought by Elena's mother and Adriano's ex-wife, Letizia Verusio (Ilaria Spada).

She makes a tearful statement to the court, in which she claims that Adriano had been too busy with work to devote time to Elena and her younger brother, Matteo (Luca Charles Brucini). Moreover, he was dismissive of medical advice concerning the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that confined Elena to a wheelchair. Offering nothing in mitigation, Adriano catches up with Letizia after the adjournment and she snaps that they had sucked at marriage. As Matteo refuses to see him, Adriano goes to his school, but the boy gives him the slip at the gates.

However, Adriano gets to read his son's statement about the day he had lied to Letizia about taking the kids to a museum and they had gone swimming in a lake instead. Elena had enjoyed being in the water, but Matteo had returned from buying lunch to find a crowd around her and he immediately feared the worst.

Discovering that Matilde is pregnant, Adriano tries to browbeat her for being so reckless while working on the vines and climbing an olive tree. She resents his intrusion, however, and smashes a window in the stables before informing him that, having coped with her father's suicide as a child, as she doesn't need any man to set boundaries. However, she is grateful when he volunteers himself as her lawyer after she and her fellow squatters are rounded up by Vice Commissario Bosco (Francesco Maria Dominedò) so that an bank employee can show the villa to prospective bidders at a forthcoming auction. Coaxing Matilde into claiming discomfort after Bosco tries to detain her for biting one of his officers on the hand, Adriano succeeds in getting them released, but he can't guarantee a happy ending regarding the villa.

Feeling protective towards Matilde (after what had happened to Elena), he frets when she insists on swimming in the sea with her friends. She also rejects getting doctors involved with her pregnancy and teases Adriano about fussing over her while they tread grapes together. As she had helped her grandfather, Matilde has a feel for wine-making, but others in the group have useful academic qualifications and Adriano likes the way they work together, just as they admire him (having looked him up online) for the underdog cases he has won against the rich and powerful.

Determined to ensure that Adriano turns up in court, Giuliana comes to the villa for Matilde's wine-tasting. She recognises that her friend is being overly protective towards the younger woman, but flirts with him whene they dance after Matilde had stormed off to bed because she had grown tired of him mollycoddling her. Giuliana reveals that she has had a boob job and wears a wig (perhaps because she lost her hair during chemo) before flirting with one of the young musicians, as Adriano goes to check on the sleeping Matilde.

Next morning, Giuliana is waiting to take Adriano to Rome. The prosecutor calls for him to be sentenced to six years for having shown no remorse over a death he had caused by reckless parenting. Responding, his counsel claims that he was taking a phone call from Letizia when he took his eye off Elena and Pesaresi suggests that this was typical of her refusal to let Adriano give his daughter moments to cherish in what he knew was a difficult life.

At this point, Adriano asks to address the court. He recalls that Elena had been fascinated by the rowing at the Paralympics and she had spotted a canoe on the shore during their day out. She had been paddling around when Letizia had phoned and Adriano bitterly regrets taking the call. But he also apologises to her in court for letting the kids be sarcastic towards her when she had always meant well by cossetting them. Adriano explains how he was paralysed for five seconds on turning to see the canoe had overturned and others had rushed into the shallow water to help Elena. But she couldn't be revived and Adriano dismays Giuliana by telling the judge that he pleads guilty to the charge.

Having spoken briefly to Matteo in the lobby, Adriano hears the judge sentence him to a suspended year in prison before imposing fines. But Adriano doesn't wait for the full judgement. Giuliana follows him into the rain and curses him to letting Letizia ruin his life when she would have adored him and given him wacky children. He kisses her fondly before hailing a taxi. On the train back to Tuscany, he thinks about Elena telling him how tired she was of her illness, as he held her in the water. She had come to resent the pity that people showed her and feared that things were only going to get worse. He had encouraged her to have faith and it was then that she saw the canoes on the bank. Perhaps that was why he hesitated, because he felt that Elena was entitled to do things her own way?

Returning to the villa during a storm, Adriano is disturbed by Matilde's dog coming to the stables. Rushing to the house, he finds her alone because the others had gone to a social dinner. Her waters have broken and Adriano helps give birth to Anita before rushing them both to the nearest hospital. He gets a long, hard glare from Matilde because he had called Anita's father, Emilio (Andrea Palma), but he feels he's done the right thing and, as he gets back into his car, he is rewarded with a text from Matteo.

Scripted by Virzì with his brother, Carlo, and Francesco Bruni, this may be a little convoluted in its plotting, while the metaphor of a dormant vineyard being tended back to life is hardly subtle. But, like Avelina Prat's similarly themed, The Portuguese House, it's an unapologetically grown-up film that is played with great intensity and dignity by Valerio Mastandrea, as he clears Adriano's way through complicated emotions and crippling guilt to a place of self-forgiveness and new beginnings. Chances are, of course, that the villa will be sold off from beneath the young countess and she will need someone else to begin family life. Presumably, also, Adriano will move back to Rome to be nearer Matteo, even if he may well not resume his career. But such imponderables only add to the pleasure of a watching a picture that respects the audience's intelligence.

While it might have been nice to get to know some of the young people around Matilde in greater depth, Virzì avoids getting bogged down in sub-sub-plots when there is already plenty going on, especially once the flashbacks start to kick in. Despite Galatea Bellugi's gift for a sulky pout, the free-spirited Matilde remains rather elusive, as does Giuliana, who is played with typically irresistible empathy and coquettish insecurity by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. Indeed, the sheer fact that she is so besotted with Adriano helps persuade us that he is a decent man, although his gallant apology to Letizia in court doesn't quite atone for her being presented as a stereotypical nagging wife with a domineering mother.

Cinematographer Luca Bigazzi's views of the vineyard across the seasons are evocatively bucolic, while production designer Sonia Peng ably contrasts the shabby grandeur of the neglected villa with the regimented order of the courtroom. Between contrasting speeches by Letizia and Adriano, little actually happens during the trial, besides some cheap (borderline chauvinistic) comedy at the expense of Anna Ferraioli Ravel's dishevelled, thick-lensed lawyer. But the brightly lit flashbacks hold the key to the case and its moral conundrum, even if we can't quite be sure what went through Adriano's mind during those fateful five seconds.

ALL RIVERS SPILL THEIR STORIES TO THE SEA.

Since debuting with Sound It Out (2011), about the last vinyl record shop on Teeside, Jeanie Finlay has produced some acutely observed and wonderfully eclectic documentaries. She returned to music in The Great Hip Hop Hoax (2013), Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (2015), and Indietracks (2016), but she has also chronicled the staging of a Christmas show in Panto! (2014) and the making of the eighth and final season of a modern television classic in Game of Thrones: The Last Watch (2019).

Moreover, Finlay has displayed great tact in following trans man Freddy McConnell's pregnancy in the Bifa-nominated Seahorse (2019) and in charting the rise of blogger Aubrey Gordon, as she worked on her first book, in Your Fat Friend (2023). Now, Finlay returns to her native North East for All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea, a reflection on an unprecedented ecological calamity that happens to hit UK cinemas in the same week that clearance was given for drilling in the North Sea's Jackdaw gas field.

According to Hartlepool fisherman Stan Rennie, his family has been making a living from the North Sea for four-to-five hundred years. He accepts that outsiders view the North East as a dump, but he loves it and, even though he returns with a catch that barely covers his diesel costs, he considers himself `the luckiest man alive', as he has a steady income, a close family, and a friendly community.

In October 2021, however, thousands of sprats washed up on local beaches and they were followed by vast numbers of starfish, as well as the crabs and lobsters on which Rennie's livelihood depended. Walker Sharon Bell tells Finlay the scene resembled something from a horror film, as the sand was covered in blackened shellfish, some of which were still twitching in what appeared to be agony. Attempts at returning the live creatures to the sea proved fruitless and Bell soon realised that the problem had reached the sea from the River Tees.

Out in his boat, Rennie sympathises with fellow fishermen, who are becoming desperate with families to feed and mortgages to pay. But he also points to the mills and factories lining the riverbank and blames them for polluting the river during Teeside's industrial heyday, which is celebrated in an old travelogue. Clips from a local TV news report, however, show that kids were getting blistered from playing on the beaches as far back as 1969. Yet nothing was done to regulate or limit the amount of waste that was dumped into the Tees and, when Margaret Thatcher's government closed the plants in the 1980s, they were left to fester, while the region's 54,000 unemployed were told to get on their bikes to find work.

Rennie voted Tory on the back of the 2016 Brexit referendum, but he tells Finlay he'd never back them again because Boris Johnson's turbo-charged economic promises did nothing for the fishing industry. Instead, efforts were focussed on the Teesside Freeport, which Mayor Ben Houchen promised would bring wealth to the North East following the levelling of the old Teesworks steelworks, as part of a mass demolition project that was rushed three in three years.

In order to remove `virgin sand' so that shipping can pass, the River Tees is dredged six days a week. However, in September 2021, the UKD Orca was used for the first time and Stan and his friends are convinced that it churned up chemicals that had bee buried in the riverbed for decades in dumping 150,000 tonnes of sediment (four times the usual amount) three miles out to sea. Beaches as far away as Scarborough were affected, but Rennie claims nothing was done to analyse the sediment to check what was being unleashed.

The fishermen weren't alone in noticing the Orca's impact. Dr Sue Wilson from Tara Seal Research is concerned by the weight of pups weaned by mothers eating contaminated fish. But getting heard is a problem, as Rennie explains when he reveals that `man of the people' Houchen has cut off communication with them because they disagree with his `facts' relating to the creation of the Freeport that will cement his reputation. He has nothing but contempt for `activists', which is what Rennie has now become through his role with the North East Fishing Collective. He takes part in protests and publicity events in order to alert people to what is happening to their environment.

Former Northern Echo journalist Leigh Jones flags up that 10 years' of remdiation work was completed in two, as the Tees Valley Combined Authority sought to push through the Freeport project to show that the `levelling up' policies promised to the Blue Wall were going to be fulfilled. He laments that his paper didn't want to criticise TVCA strategy because it was a major advertiser and local newspaper revenues are currently very fragile. But he questions how sensitive Houchen is to any form of criticism, while spending a fortune on Facebook ads boostering his profile.

Prawn fisherman John Wallace tells Finlay that he is having to sell his boat because he can't make a living. He denounces Westminster for doing nothing to help and has to walk away because he is so distressed about the hopelessness of his debt-mounting situation. Dismayed by DEFRA blaming the mass die-off on an algal bloom rather than Orca's activities, the North East Fishing Collective crowdfunds an independent assessement of water quality by Professor Rodney Forster of the University of Hull. Professor Dave Roberts from the University of Durham also joins the campaign and large quantities of pyridine are found in the shellfish. Roberts conducts lab experiments with crabs and is shocked by the convulsions they experience soon after exposure. Yet Houchen dismisses the findings as being as conspiratorial as blaming the pollution on Russian submarines.

With Rennie refusing to fish at the mouth of the estuary because he wouldn't eat anything caught there, he starts going further north, adding to his costs in the process. Meanwhile, Finlay has found former factory worker Chris Adnett, who says pyridine's toxic potential has been known for decades and yet no one has banned it.

She also meets algae specialist Dr John Rothwell from the University of Durham, who reckons that the seaweed that protects coastal waters is being depleted at a time when global warming is having untold impact on chemical-bearing sediment. He fears that tipping point might have been reached off the North-East coast and it dismays him that several government agencies could help, but the impetus has to come from above and there is no interest in anything that might rock the economic boat.

Thirteen months after the first die-off, Rennie goes to London to appear before a House of Commons committee and he speaks about the mental health of fishers and their families. The dredging angle is explored, but deflected. But Dr Gary Caldwell from Newcastle University makes no bones about the three potential causes, but DEFRA still ruled out dredging and Houchen was able to crow about the progress he was making on South Bank Quay, which would require two million tonnes of material to be excavated. Houchen claimed that not a gram of toxic material would enter the river, but Finlay and Rennie capture footage of slurry dropping out of the dredger bucket into the water.

Labour politician Jim McMahon comes to Hartlepool to meet with NEFC and raises a question on their behalf in the Commons, only for minister Thérèse Coffey to dismiss him and the fishing community with contempt. She also stonewalled at a committee hearing when asked about an update on the cause of the 2021 extinction event and confirmed that no further Environment Agency research had been carried out because there hadn't been a similar incident anywhere else in the country.

As the mayor is re-elected for another four years, the drawing on the forehead of a Houchen mask seems to sum up the situation quite nicely. He will carry on with his schemes, while the fishers of Hartlepool and its environs will be left on the brink. He is rewarded with a life peerage in Boris Johnson's resignation honours list and seems set for life. Rennie's medical prognosis is not to rosy, but he battles on. Dr Wilson laments the fact that every seal pup born on the Tees estuary in 2025 died. She can't conduct the research to find out why, but she has her theories and they don't coincide with the official findings behind which Houchen hides while crying crocodile tears for the fishers who have lost everything since the demolition of the Dorman Long Tower in Middlesbrough, which happened six days before the first die-off in September 2021. That's alright, then.

Much has been made in the media about Stan Rennie being the Mr Bates of the fishing industry, after Alan Bates had taken on the Post Office to expose skullduggery back in 2019. Jeanie Finlay avoids conclusions in this impeccably produced documentary. But, as a Stockton-on-Tees native, she makes it more than clear where her sympathies lie. She also leaves little doubt in which direction fingers are pointing, through her astute use of extracts from Ben Houchen's public statements and the barbed humour of Rennie and his mates. He should be embarrassed at being exposed in such a manner, but the thought would never enter his head.

It's heartbreaking to watch seals, lobsters, and crabs suffering the effects of Tees toxicity. But the human toll is just as devastating, as proud people who have worked hard for their entire lives have been discarded with no recompense or, it would seem, a second thought. This is clearly a subject that matters to Finlay and not just because her mother swims in the North Sea three times a week. She is very good at taking the part of the underdog and using wry humour to deflate those who would oppress them. It's hard to see how this story can end in any other way than a resounding defeat for the fisherfolk and the coastline they love. But their fight will go on and, one hopes, they will inspire those in the other areas that have been designated freeport sites to stand up for their own rights.