Parky At the Pictures (25/9/2026)

(Reviews of Remake; Babystar; Quasi Grazia; and North Sea, Nature Untamed)

REMAKE.

Documentarist Ross McElwee trained under cinéma vérité pioneers Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus and worked as a cameraman for Direct Cinema maestro, D.A. Pennebaker. His observational films have always blended the profound and the personal, with Sherman's March (1986) combining American history, Cold War reality, and McElwee's romantic entanglements. His parenting skills came under scrutiny in Six O'Clock News (1997), along with the way in which news is reported in the United States and how reality becomes mediated when filmed. The family connection with the tobacco trade was explored in Bright Leaves (2003), which also muses on Hollywood history, while his daughter's adoption process is considered in In Paraguay (2008).

The impact of grief was the theme of Time Indefinite (1993), while a sentimental return to a youthful haunt informed Photographic Memory (2011). The latter also reflected on the clashes between McElwee and his film-maker son, Adrian, who took a markedly different approach to recording reality. Their relationship comes under scrutiny again in Remake, which sees McElwee delving into his archive in an effort to make sense of his 27 year-old son's death from a fentanyl overdose on Christmas Eve in 2016.

Over a hand-drawn flip-book animation of a squid leaping to catch something falling from the palm tree dominating a small island, Ross McElwee laments the fact he never got to rewatch the footage he had shot over the years of his son Adrian. Seven years have passed since his death and the images of Adrian catching crayfish as a boy, doing his homework as an adolescent, and typing on his laptop as a young man manage both to keep him alive and confirm his passing. There's a note of regret in Ross's voice, but also a sad acceptance that there was a kind of inevitability about Adrian's demise.

In his films, Ross had used family life as a lens through which to make sense of the world around him. Everything had seemed blissful during the filming of In Paraguay, which had followed the efforts of Ross and wife Marilyn to adopt their infant daughter, Mariah. Adrian had been keen to be filmed at this stage, but being Ross's subjects took its toll and his camera was eventually resisted by his wife and kids in the period preceding his divorce.

Uncertain about his future, Ross received a call from a Hollywood producer about turning Sherman's March in to a dramatic feature. He consulted siblings Dede and Tom, who wonders whether a movie could bomb twice in suggesting that much would depend on how much control Ross would retain over the material. He meets with Steve Carr in Hollywood - the director of such comedies as Dr Dolittle 2 (2001), Daddy Day Care (2003), and Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009) - and jokes that friend and former poetry teacher, Charleen Swansea, wants Amy Adams to play her.

She had been the subject of Ross's first film, Charleen (1978), and he had recorded her meeting Adrian as a baby in Time Indefiinite. She doesn't see how such a personal film about Ross's searching for love, while also retracing the steps of an epic Civil War episode, could be turned into a fictional story. She also doubts whether they could be adequately replaced by actors. By contrast, Adrian thinks it might make a cool indie flick and insists on filming his father signing the rights contract (although they disagree over the best way to capture the moment).

Charleen is participating in a medical survey on memory and she confides to the camera that her short-term memory is unpredictable. But she thinks that memories often come as a surprise and we see home-movie clips of her to show how central she has been to Ross's life, but also how she has changed over the decades. He realises that people on film stay the same forever, even though they change in reality, and this makes him wonder whether he was filming real versions or those he had constructed. Ross also ponders whether a memory is more realistic than an image. Suddenly, the ordered features he has cut together seem jumbled and make less sense than they had before.

Adrian had written a novel about his life and wanted to turn it into a film. He had questioned his father turning down Jaguar adverts and other commercial opportunities and had vowed to do things his own way. However, while he had been working on a range of projects, Adrian had discovered that getting a start was not so easy and that Ross's example of starting from the bottom and working up might not be so feeble after all.

Meanwhile, Ross has recorded a voiceover for a showreel for Steve Carr. He rubs his forehead, as he watches this on his laptop. But the next he hears is that the film has been scrapped and Carr is set to direct the pilot for a TV series. On hearing friend

Philip Osborne had died, Ross decides to return to North Carolina to remind himself that the `characters' in Sherman's March had been real people with real lives. He gets a warm welcome from Phil, Jr., who has taken over the family garage. We see Philip discussing his daughter's death from cancer, the same disease that claimed Doris McElwee when she was still young. Ross goes to the family burial plot in Charlotte to find Doris's headstone had disappeared and we see the lettering that had imprinted itself into the soil of the sod that had grown over it.

He tracks down Wini Wood, another Sherman's March alum, who was presented as living a hippie-like alternative lifestyle. She is grateful to be able to see herself as she was and notes how Ross had used other films to preserve aspects of her life. Wini also likes the way his work connects the past to the present. But that connection has gone for Charleen, as dementia means she has no recollection of making films with Ross, with the celebrated scenes of them exploring an old military bunker (when she accuses him of mixing up sex and death) or her teaching a poetry class meaning nothing to her.

Determined not to forget Adrian, Ross plugs on with his film, even though it means revisiting such painful moments as his divorce and Adrian's teenage battles with drinking and drug taking. Ross reveals that they had sent him to summer camps and therapists without success, as he had been expelled from school for marijuana possession and had been hospitalised after overdosing on vodka and ecstasy. They chat about his episodes on camera, with Ross warning Adrian that he could do something stupid without meaning to. He even cites his concerns about his son when asked what bothers him when he is diagnosed with an operable brain tumour.

Two days before surgery, Ross had filmed a neighbour building a wooden flower box that he felt looked like a coffin. He dwelt on the 5% failure rate and not seeing his children again and recalls the thrill he got when the 21 year-old Adrian had smuggled a small digital camera into his room eight days after the op, so he could start filming again. Ross was also relieved that Marilyn agreed to postpone their divorce while he recovered, but the stay only lasted a month and we see removal men emptying rooms that had featured in so many McElwee films. Adrian and Mariah had been central figures, but the former had now been diagnosed as bipolar and was taking lithium Iin a bid to control things.

In Prague for a retrospective, Ross enters the projection booth during footage of his wedding ceremony. He wants to tell the audience that the vows are now fiction, as he and Marilyn have not stayed together forever. We see two occasions when Adrian insisted on taking the camera and filming his father, with the older version criticising him for not making him a child star, as it would have given him collateral in making his way as an adult film-maker. Adrian asks why Ross only rarely filmed himself and is unimpressed when he responds that audiences don't want to see him but what he sees.

They film each other, with Ross wearing a Go-Pro on a baseball cap while making Adrian an omelette. Each admits that mistakes have been made, but Adrian feels his parents are more to blame than he is for his tendencies and lapses. Despite being warned that a wine glass will spill if he carries it on a plate with his food, Adrian picks up the tray and promptly knocks the glass over as he sits on the sofa. He lets a sheepish grin slip, while pretending there's no harm done.

Carr has now decided to make a sitcom version of Sherman's March and Ross isn't sure he's happy with the way things are panning out. From his comments at the Venice launch of Photographic Memory, Adrian also feels peeved about having so much of his life being presented for public consumption. Ross reveals that he had ditched the lithium by this stage, as he felt it deprived him of his natural spark. Amidst a montage of them attending other festivals, we see footage Adrian filmed of himself bouncing on the bed in his room, as Ross explains that Adrian had often including festival clips in the music videos he directed (and we see an example).

He wonders whether filming his son and letting him share the festival experience had helped destablise him and Ross is haunted by a journalist's accusation that he had been too tough on the boy and sometimes judgemental. Ross explains that someone coming to that film without knowing of the seven years of drug and alcohol abuse that had preceded it might draw the wrong conclusion about their relationship. But he also worries that Adrian had come to believe that the version of himself he saw in Photographic Memory had sapped his hope that he would get through this period and live a happy life as himself. Footage also reveals that Adrian had occasionally fallen foul of the Boston police and this further complicates his situation and makes it harder to know the extent to which his problems could be attributed to the impact of others.

Having been identified as one of the Boston Marathon bombers by an eyewitness, Adrian was briefly questioned by the FBI. But he decided to quit the city and moved to Colorado. We see Go-Pro footage of Adrian skiing and Ross confides on the soundtrack to being mesmerised by his shadow and felt as though he was inhabiting his son's body because his perspectival images were so vivid. But the end was not to be far away.

Ross had married South Korean film-maker Hyun Kyung Kim Kyung Kim, who refuses to let him film her face, as she's an observer not a performer. They each bring a camera to their wedding vows and Ross is touched that the speak the same filmic language, as her work is similar to his own (she is making a documentary about the impact of the Korean War on three generations of her family). She gets on well with Mariah, who is still studying. But Adrian has remained in Colorado and Ross visits after he is checked into a rehab centre. They have a discussion over his 18-month addiction to black tar heroin and how he was spending large sums purchasing from Mexican cartels.

He spends Thanksgiving with the family and meets Hyun. Adrian is considering moving back to Boston, but he overdoses in Ross's bathroom and the medical reports say he had lapsed again after doing so well. Ross finds a note in smudged red pen, in which Adrian discusses being many conflicting personalities and how hard he finds it to keep things under control. While filming items like his cooking spoon and his phone, Ross thinks he sees Adrian trapped beneath the cracked glass of his phone screen, even though he knows it's his own reflection.

As he looks at the footage Adrian had left behind and his own images, Ross begins to see his son through his own eyes. It's a painful process, as it makes him realise the signs he missed. But it also gives him a new understanding of what Adrian was going through. During this time, someone makes an opera out of Sherman's March, which has footage projected behind the singers (so the lip synching on Charleen saying `this is not art, this is life' is perfect). This coincides with him deciding to have his old piano tuned, as Hyun has started to play, even though he no longer can because of a wrist injury.

Over footage of his flip-book and Adrian fishing, Ross recalls a poem he had written as a boy about a giant squid and apologises to him for not diving deeply enough to fathom him. It's a poignant note on which to end a memorial that slips between lament and confession, as McElwee seeks to make sense of a shattering loss that appears no easier to bear after a decade of grieving.

But this is much more than an encomium to a lost son. McElwee wants to examine his own legacy and how Adrian's death impinges upon it. He considers the price of putting precious private moments into the public domain and than having to deal with people's emotional reaction to them and the prospect of somebody believing they can reinterpret them in their own way. In some ways, Remake is McElwee's bid to mitigate the effect of the proposed fictionalisation of his thirtysomething rite of passage. Yet he also seems to be seeking to recast his own footage of Adrian in a search for clues and to salvage the connection that had been damaged by years of addiction and distance.

It's an ambitous dual project and it says much for the clarity of McElwee's thinking and the ingenuity of the way he and co-editor Joe Bini piece together fragments from different sources that acquire new meaning as McElwee observes them with older, wiser, and sadder eyes. The 78 year-old is still capable of self-deprecating wit, although he often feels to be on the defensive in the face of criticism from Adrian, Charleen, and his siblings. He has also clearly met his match in Hyun, who uses her camera to signify her head shaking when he asks he to let him film her face during their exchange of vows as a wedding present. Yet she is still not as elusive as McElwee himself, as he never confides why he feels the need to record so compulsively the momentous and the mundane. What is he like without a camera in his hand?

Just as Sherman's March resists being remodelled, Adrian's life cannot easily be summed up or explained. Neither father nor son could manage to change the story or recover lost time. But they have succeeded in ensuring that the everyday and the extraordinary events that made up their existence won't simply disappear like Charleen's memories - at least as long as the celluloid and digital formats endure and there is someone there to watch.

BABYSTAR.

German thirtysomething Joscha Bongard feels like perfect casting for a story about a family living on camera. Before becoming a film-maker, he served an internship with TubeOne, an agency that managed and marketed social media personalities. Following shorts like Alacritas (2015) and Young, Fragile (2020), Bongard attracted attention with his documentary, Pornfluencer (2022), which centred on Jamie Young and Nico Nice, a Cyprus-based couple seeking to make their Internet fortune as Youngcouple9598. Now, he remains in the world of online performance for his feature bow, Babystar.

As four tweenage children pull up in a minibus outside a modern house in a gated community, social media stars Stella (Bea Brocks) and Chris (Liliom Lewald) emerge to greet them with their 16 year-old daughter, Luca (Maja Bons). One kid rushes to hug his idol, while the others stand and stare before being invited to spend the afternoon with the Sommers. Having found their tongues, the youngsters prove incisive with their questions about wealth, cosmetic and clothing brands, and corrective surgery. Her parents take it all in their impassive stride, but Luca (who is known as `Nunki') is taken aback because she has so little contact with the outside world.

She smiles nervously and seeks out Julie (Joy Ewulu), an agency chaperone who lets Nunki try her vape. As close as she has to a friend, Nunki wishes she could spend more time with Julie. But she settles back into the cosily sterile routine that sees her father exercise compulsively, while she and her mother bask on sun loungers beside the pool. When she can't sleep at night, Nunki tries listing the products the family is paid to promote, but she winds up wandering into her parents' bedroom and clambering in between them.

Chris and Stella have been sharing on the `Our Bright Life' site since before Nunki was born. Indeed, her conception and birth were filmed for clicks and we see a range of clips from her childhood, including a mother-daughter talk in The Podcast Room, in which the nine year-old Nunki was told about periods. One day, the boss of an AI company (Verena Altenberger) comes to film the trio so that their avatars can be sold as ready-made friends and confidantes. Nunki wishes she had a friend, as she poses for the cameras capturing the gestures and expressions that will condemn her to always being 16 in some corner of the Internet.

Aware that the family is in this enterprise together, Nunki is prepared to trust her parents. But, when they reveal that they are thinking of having a baby because it would create great content and open up new revenue streams, Nunki feels betrayed. Fearing not being the centre of attention any longer, she also feels discarded because she's become too old to put on display as daddy's little girl. Denying them permission to change the contracted family, Nunki is surprised when her parents ask her to chose a pet dog. She goes for a scruffy pup named Jürgen rather than a designer breed more in keeping with their lifestyle. However, she struggles to connect with the eager animal and is traumatised when Jürgen nearly drowns in the lake when she forces him to fetch a stick. When she hears noises from her parents' bedroom, she barges in to prevent them from making a baby and she thinks she's got things under control.

Hoping to get back to normal, Stella and Chris coax Nunki into dressing up for dinner at a posh restaurant. She enjoys herself, even though Chris has a camera whirring away on a tripod on the table. When the waiter removes the silver dome covering her desert, however, Nunki is appalled to see that the words `Only Child', written in chocolate sauce on the rim of the plate, have been crossed out. She stomps out of the dining area, only to return to remove her shoes and her squat over a plastic container to urinate (just as we had seen her use the potty for the first time in some earlier footage). Stella rushes over to cover her daughter, as she pulls down her dress, and they are seen comfort eating in the car before taking Nunki home.

While her parents are busy telling followers that they have been hacked and that an impostor planted the restaurant stunt, Nunki moves out and uses her celebrity to coerce the nervous hotel desk clerk, Simon (Maximilian Mundt), into giving her a swanky room. She calls Julie and they spend an afternoon together in the countryside. But Julie is reluctant to get involved with the family dispute, as she can't afford to take sides. Nevertheless, she sees how fragile Nunki is and spends the night in her bed, having stroked her back in the way that Stella does to help her sleep.

Stella brings Jürgen to the hotel in an effort to persuade Nunki to come home. But she insists that she needs to strike out on her own, as she can't see herself being a bit player after the baby arrives. They hug, with slightly moreeling than usual, but Stella knows she can't jeopardise a potentially lucrative storyline.

Nunki tries to make her own content, but her heart isn't in it. Instead, she confides in her own avatar about how miserable she feels and takes solace in the programmed platitudes. Julie brings some face masks for her to model, but Nunki has a panic attack and rips the gauze off her cheeks. Desperate to connect, she asks Simon to sleep with her and he nervously comes to her room, where they both get so jittery that nothing happens.

Annoyed that Stella and Chris are making preparations for the baby without mentioning her, Nunki selects one of her follower families and descends upon them to see if living with them would make good viewing. Irritated by the father conducting a dinner table inquisition into which of his two teenagers scratched his car, Nunki blurts out that she sang a Natasha Bedingfield song at her grandmother's funeral and a resounding silence ensues.

After trading face slaps with Marie (Maria Matschke), who has quickly seen through Nunki's shallowness, she returns home in time to see Chris and Stella setting up a birthing pool in the main room. Pleased to see her daughter, Stella embraces her and Chris gives her a hearty hug. But they are reluctant to discuss her suggestion that they agree contracts and storylines to ensure that she has a say in how Our Bright Life is run and how she fits in. Instead, Stella asks Nunki if she would help out with the camera because Chris will be in the water supporting her. When Nunki questions if this is really necessary, Stella says it would be unfair on her new daughter if her birth was not broadcast like her sister's had been.

Watching from behind the camera, Nunki feels emotional as Stella gives birth. But she is the last person her mother looks at after her baby and her husband and, even then, there's less affection in her glance than an apprehension that Nunki is somehow going to ruin the moment. As her parents sleep, Nunki takes the infant from their bed and bundles her up before leaving the house, with Jürgen trotting after her, in an effort to spare her sister everything that she has been through.

Cynics might suggest that Nunki is leaving to exploit her sibling for her own venture. But she seems to have the best intentions in removing the child from its home so soon after her birth. No doubt it will be difficult to disappear to raise her on her own, so the ending is fraught with risks, as well as plenty of unlikelihoods. However, plausibility is always on the strained side in a satire that is so situational that it doesn't leave itself any room for deeper analysis. Lampooning superficial people and their stylised milieu needs a little edge, even cruelty, to underscore the points. Yet Bongard and co-scenarist Nicole Rüthers seem reluctant to deny anyone the reasons that French auteur Jean Renoir insisted were the right of even the most despicable characters.

Stella and Chris make mistakes in trying to create a streaming version of Happy Families. But they are not bad people. They have assessed their strengths and weaknesses and fashioned personas that appeal to both the public and the marketeers with products and lifestyles to push. Of course, Nunki has been raised in isolation and there is genuine pathos in her claim to have no friends, let alone a boyfriend. Yet it's only when her co-starring role is threatened that she starts to rebel, as she has been complicit in her incarceration - unlike Jim Carrey's character in Ron Howard's The Truman Show (1998).

Maja Bons plays Luca/Nunki with few changes of expression, as she has learnt from her time in front of the camera to control her body language so as not to give too much away. Being a public figure doesn't entitle the audience to access to every facet of even a social media celebrity's existence and it's sad to see the family interacting in bathrooms and bedrooms as though they were still performing rather than simply cohabiting. Bea Brocks and Lilion Lewald are even more practiced at poker facing, even when they're alone together. But it's difficult to dislike them, as they started out trying to get by and have allowed success to ensnare them in a trap of their own making.

This has been archly designed by Martha Inés Brenner and Felicitas Püls to give the impression of enviably modish luxury. But the house feels as cold and bland as the Sommers themselves and it's amusing to contrast Nunki's attitude to her own home and that of the family she auditions to adopt her, feels lived in, despite not being particularly welcoming. Joan Besch and Stephanie Zursteggd's costumes are also clevely calibrated, as Stella and Nunki are modelling their clothes rather than feeling comfortable in them. Even their video memories are not exclusively their own, although Jakob Sinsel deftly differentiates between the visual styles that Chris and Stella have employed over the course of their exhibitionist careers. Shame they can't use Jonas Vogler's choral score on their sites, as it manages to be both inspirational and deeply unsettling.

It's noticeable that the tension dips after Nunki leaves home, as though she has left her personality behind. She has nothing to kick against in the hotel room. Moreover, she lacks basic life skills, communicating more readily with her avatar than she does with Julie (although Bongard opts out of exploring the nature of Nunki's feelings for her). Whatever lies in store for her is going to be challenging, as life will never be so regimented again and she is singularly unprepared to face it's vicissitudes. Had Rongard not been so reserved in his depiction and so restrained in his satirical thrust at both capitalist acquisitiveness and social media (perhaps because he knows the influencing scene too well), she might have stood a better chance. But there are no guarantees in our digitally obsessed world.

QUASI GRAZIA.

Sardinian director Peter Marcias has done a little bit of everything. Since contributing an episode to the 2006 anthology, Bambini, he has produced shorts, documentaries, and features, as well as a couple of animations. He addressed LGBTQIA+ issues in Ma la Spagna non era cattolica?/But Wasn't Spain Catholic? (2007) and Silenzi e parole/ Silences and Words (2017) before exploring the art of documentary film-making in Uno sguardo alla Terra/A Look At the Earth (2018) and the right to work in Uomini in marcia/Marching People (2023).

On the feature front, he has followed his debut, Un attimo sospesi/A Suspended Moment (2008), with I bambini della sua vita/Children of Her Life (2010), Dimmi che destino avrò/My Destiny (2012), and La nostra quarantena/Our Quarantine (2015). But what makes him the perfect director for Quasi Grazia (2025), a tribute to the first Italian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, is the documentary triptych about female pioneers,

Liliana Cavani, una donna nel cinema/Liliana Cavani, A Woman in Cinema (2010), Tutte le storie di Piera/All of Piera's Stories (2013), and Nilde Iotti, il tempo delle donne/Nilde Iotti, The Time of Women (2020), which respectively profiled a provocative film-maker (Liliana Cavani), `the barefoot queen of the Italian stage (Piera Degli Esposti), and the first woman to become the president of the Chamber of Deputies (Nilde Iotti).

Rome, 1907 and Grazia Deledda (Irene Maiorino) is trying to start a new novel while husband Palmiro Madesani and her children are out. She is interrupted by the arrival of her mother, Francesca (Monica Demuru), who asks why she never returns to her Sardinian home of Nuoro. Frustrated at being interrupted and embarrassed at having nothing to offer her mother to eat, Grazia gets flustered and rushes into the garden. Francesca follows and they discuss how her parents had disapproved of her ambitions to become a writer, with her father, Giovanni, blaming her poor eyesight on the books upon which she had wasted so much time. When Grazia defends her choices, Francesca chides her for always thinking she was the most intelligent person in the room and tells her to show some respect.

Trying to settle at her typewriter, Grazia hears her brother, Santus (Stefano Mereu), calling from the garden and they embrace warmly. Again, she is ashamed at having no bread or milk, but he assures her he isn't hungry, as he sits at the kitchen table with their mother. He grumbles that his old-fashioned name marks him as an outsider on the mainland, but Francesca insists he should be proud of his Sardinian heritage. Catching Grazia alone, she urges her to pray for her brother, as his health is failing and she reiterates that family is more important than literature, even though Grazia avers that writing is her passion. Francesca snipes that she isn't an author, but a busybody who intrudes upon lives that are not her own. She orders Santus to return to Nuoro with her and, when Grazia implores him to stay and live on his own terms, Francesca intervenes and tells her daughter to enjoy living in her empty house and having the last word, as she will come to see that she is not always right about everything. Hurt that her mother refuses to recognise her achievement, Grazia explains that she had never returned to the Sardinia she has written about because nobody from the island had acknowledged her efforts to record life as she had witnessed it.

Left alone, Grazia hears the housekeeper returning from buying provisions. She asks about an embroidered dress that has been left on a table - one her mother had unpacked from her suitcase and Grazia had held to her face to breathe in the past - and the housekeeper explains that she had left it there while cleaning a cupboard.

The scene shifts to Stockholm in December 1927, as Grazia (Laura Morante) is escorted by Palmiro (Roberto De Francesco) to collect her Nobel Prize. She is interviewed by Irishman Richard Wilson (Jack McAvoy), who notes that they are both exiles from their native islands. She recalls the day she found some poems that her father had written and decided that she would like to write. At 13, she had penned her first story and she had experienced a sense of freedom that encouraged her to continue, in spite of parental disapproval. She was supported, however, by her tutor, Andrea Pirodda (Matteo Tedde), who is seen reading the letters in which Grazia had confided her feelings during her early years on the mainland.

Finding a quiet place to sit, Grazia is joined by the spirit of her mother, who accuses her of arrogance in thinking that she should be congratulated on her award. She curses that she hadn't knocked her sense of superiority out of her as a child, but then takes credit for being the driving force behind Grazia's desire to write and escape, as every artist needs a foe to rebel against. Grazia recalls Andrea's last letter, in which he had asked her not to write again because he had been hurt by the news she had married Palmiro, who was then attached to the Ministry of Fance in Cagliari. With his waxed moustache and stiff manner, he seems pompous. But Grazia relies on him and thanks him for being her rock in the run up to receiving the prize and having to give two speeches. He acclaims her the most famous woman writer in the world, a remark that echoes Wilson's question about Grazia's familiarity with the works of Selma Lagerlöf, the Swede who had become the first female Nobel laureate in 1909.

The final sequence is set in Rome in 1935, as Grazia (Ivana Monti) is accompanied to hospital by her niece, Mirella (Gala Zohar Martinucci). She undergoes X-rays to determine the extent to which her breast cancer has spread and thinks of her mother and brother, while waiting to see her doctor (Roberto Citran). She compliments a small boy on reading a book and chats to a nun who checks she's okay, while thinking back about her mother and Santus. When the professor breaks the news to Mirella that Grazia's condition is incurable, she refuses to believe him and vows to seek a second opinion in Germany or Switzerland. He informs her that Il Duce had checked on her aunt's condition and promises to do everything to ensure she doesn't suffer. Meanwhile, Grazia wanders the grounds with her walking stick and ponders her past. As they prepare to leave, she tells Mirella that she will treat her new heroine to a miraculous cure, as she intends to finish the semi-autobiographical La chiesa della solitudine/The Church of Solitude. Francesca wanders up to her and offers a smile of reassurance that makes Grazia cry.

Closing captions reveal that Santus committed suicide in 1916 at the age of 52 (after becoming an alcoholic following the firework accident that had damaged his face). Francesca died a few months later. Grazia passed away on 15 August 1936, having seen her writings published across the world. A final shot sees Grazia on Palmiro's arm, as she enters the Nobel ceremony. In voiceover, she declares that parents should punish a child twice for wanting to write, but should accept after a third time that they are a poet.

This appears to have been Grazia Deledda's experience, although one has to be pretty au fait with her life and works to pick a way through this handsome, if selective celebration, which makes few concessions for newcomers. Clearly, this adaptation of a novel by Marcello Fois struck a chord, however, as it was shortlisted for Italy's submission for the Best International Film category at the Academy Awards.

Irene Maiorino, Laura Morante, and Ivana Monti play Grazia with studied intensity, but she remains rather elusive, as the focus is narrowed on to three significant moments that leave a lot unexplored about both her personality and her personal history, as well as about her writing. Apart from a few lines read on the soundtrack, the Deledda canon is barely touched, without a single book title being mentioned (in the subtitles at least). Consequently, we learn little about her subject matter or how she fitted into Italian cultural life before and during the Fascist era.

Marcias makes acute use of archive footage to convey the look and ambience of Deledda's Sardinia, while locations like Villa Tuscolana in Frascati and Villa Mondragone in Monte Porzio Catone are splendidly atmospheric. Production designer Barbara Tomada and costumier Luigi Bonanno merit mention, as does cinematographer Valerio Azzali, who creates an ethereal aura that helps Marcias convey how Grazia's memories and reveries impact upon her daily routine. This isn't an easy film for the uninitiated, but it certainly intrigues, even though it doesn't necessarily inspire viewers to seek out Deledda's books.

NORTH SEA, NATURE UNTAMED.

Born in Kenya, trained in Britain, and seasoned in Australia, Mark Verkerk has spent three decades directing films. Although his debut feature, Buddha's Lost Children (2006) was about a Thai monk using boxing to keep kids off drugs. more recent titles have focused on natural history. Now, The New Wilderness (2013), Holland: The Living Delta (2017), and Wild Amsterdam (2018) are joined by North Sea, Nature Untamed, which took Verkerk and diver and underwater cinematographer Peter van Rodijnen seven years to make

As a boy, Van Rodijnen became hooked on the TV shows fronted by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, from whom he picked up such wisdom as, `The best way to observe a fish is to become a fish.' Taking up diving and underwater cinematography, Van Rodijnen developed a fascination with the North Sea and, from his Zeeland Delta base, he started discovering species like the shorthorn sculpin. whose males spend the winter cleaning and protecting the neon-pink eggs that hatch after eight weeks of unbroken vigilance.

As we soon see, the North Sea is teeming with marine life of all shapes and sizes. The abundance of plankton can limit visibility, but it feeds a complex and thriving eco system with which Van Rodijnen is happy to get up close and personal, even when it means filming those simultaneous hermaphrodite crustaceans known as barnacles, which have the longest penis-to-body-size ratio in the entire animal kingdom, so that they can stretch up to eight times their length in order to mate with neighbours.

Plankton attracts giant basking sharks to the north-east coast of Scotland, where they are seen gliding with maws open to suck in the tiny organisms that Van Rodijnen films in exquisite close-ups. Sand eels are as partial to the plankton as puffins are to them. But a combination of overfishing and climate change are leading to food shortages that have depleted the puffin population by 30% on the Isle of May (although competition from greedy gulping minky whales doesn't help). Black-backed gulls also feed on sand eels and, if they can't steal the fish, they are happy to serve young puffins to their chicks. It's tough on the food chain and Van Rodijnen can't resist helping a stranded baby puffin find a place form which to make its first flight.

As the seasons change, brittlestars bloom to form living carpets across the North Sea bed, although they attract wolffish, with their enormous teeth. We see various flatfish burying themselves in the bed for camouflage from predators. But Van Rodijnen is aware this tactic doesn't work against fishing nets and he goes out with a trawler to see how new chainless nets are causing less damage to the sea bed. Yet, he is also dismayed to see creatures being discarded after being caught up in the trawl and he dislikes the fact that so much of a catch goes into animal feed. He enjoys fish himself and accepts that fishermen need to be able to make a living, but Van Rodijnen has misgivings about an industry that operates so indiscriminately.

Nothing goes to waste on the sea bed, however, as dead fish thrown back into the water provide food for a range of small creatures, including the hermit crab, which has devised a clever way of covering its vulnerable hind quarters with discarded shells. As they grow, they discard the shell and find something larger to fit the bill. Grey seal pups have no such defences against tides whipped up by a storm, however, and we see the impact the tempest has on Scottish and Dutch beaches. As the North Sea is so shallow, storms impact on the sea bed, with starfish being washed up on the shore.

Barriers have been erected to protect low-lying coasts and these cause a problem to marine life. But they learn to adapt. As night falls, Van Rodijnen films bioluminescent algae casting their glowing blue light, while ragworms exhaust themselves in laying and fertilising eggs to become prey for hungry crabs. More romantic are the mating rituals of the cuttlefish off the Dutch coast, as they lock into an embrace. As winter comes, Van Rodijnen goes in search of spawning salmon, who have returned to familiar waters after long journeys from above the Arctic circle. The population had dipped alarmingly in this part of the Denmark, but a managed revival has resulted in 7000 salmon returning for the annual mating season.

Climate change has had a detrimental impact on the North Sea. But there are signs of hope, as Van Rodijnen discovers on the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland. Kelp forests are helping to deal with CO₂ emissions, while also providing a habitat and food for marine life, including the seals, who use the kelp beds for hunting and playing. They are disturbed, however, as are the local dolphins, by the pounding of the hammers being used in the construction of off-shore wind turbines. They are hoped to be eco friendly, but their effectiveness is yet to be conclusive, even though they are proliferating. Van Rodijnen is optimistic, however, that their foundations and cables may attract animals, as with some natural stones that were lost overboard years before and are now alive with lifeforms forming a mini-reef.

Commending Nature for its ability to mend and make good when left alone to do so, Van Rodijnen notes that the mullet (usually a warm water fish) has come to share the environs with hardier dabs and they have found ways to get along. Off Shetland, mackerel stocks have been restored and a pod of orcas follows the trawler in the hope of picking up some of the 1000 fish they need a day to survive. Birds also hover, drawn by the familiar sound of the winch. Van Rodijnen dislikes commercial fishing, but accepts that sticking to quotas is a way forward and has done much to stabilise the situation in the once overfished North Sea.

Heading to Sweden, he finds that North Atlantic blue fin tuna have returned for the first time since the 1960s. Leisure fishermen join with scientists to catch one so it can be measured and tagged inside two minutes. Conservation is the way forward, as Cousteau once said that people only protect what they love. To that end, Van Rodijnen teaches young Zeelanders to scuba diva and learn about the marine life they see. Investing in future enthusiasm is a key way to ensure the fight goes on, along with films like this that seek to inform and inspire.

Narrating, as well as providing the exceptional underwater footage, Van Rodijnen ably conveys his passion for this subject and the urgency of the need to save our seas. Dick Harrewijn contributes some splendid topside photography, notably during the puffin and seal sequences, which are adeptly edited by Verkerk, with help from Helen Delachaux and Sam Reitsma.

It can feel a bit scattershot at times, while Sven Figee's score can swoop and swell a little overwhelmingly. But this is supposed to be a whistlestop tour rather than an in-depth Attenboroughian treatise. Demonstrating that the forbidding, often freezing brown waters that lap Britain's eastern coastline are a hive of activity, diversity, and beauty, this is a timely primer that will hopefully persuade others to accept the difficulty of filming in the often inhospitable depths to unlock more of the North Sea's secrets.