Parky At the Pictures (25/9/2026)

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

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.