Parky At the Pictures (29/5/2026)

(Reviews of Illusione; Leonora in the Morning Light; and No Place For Football)

ILLUSIONE.

At the outset of her directorial career, Francesca Archibugi had a love affair with the Donatello Awards. She won Best New Director with her feature bow, Mignon Has Come to Stay (1988), and Best Film with both Towards Evening (1990) and The Great Pumpkin (1993). The major awards might have dried up, but Archibugi has remained one of Italy's most respected film-makers, with dramas like With Closed Eyes (1994), Shooting the Moon (1998), Tomorrow (2001), and Flying Lessons (2007) being followed by a string of comedies, A Question of the Heart (2009), An Italian Name (2015), and Couch Potatoes (2017).

She has returned to more serious topics of late, with Vivere (2019) and The Hummingbird (2022) now being followed by Illusione, which is screening in London this weekend under the auspices of CinemaItaliaUK. Having been moved by the fact that a headline report about a dead body being found in a ditch in Perugia received no further press coverage because it was no longer deemed newsworthy, Archibugi reunited with the co-scenarists on her previous picture, Francesco Piccolo and Laura Paolucci, to provide an empathetic memorial to a young woman the rest of the world had forgotten.

When Deputy Commissioner Giovanni Pizzirò (Filippo Timi) is called to the discovery of a girl's body in a ditch, he realises she is still alive and has her rushed to hospital. After the teenager is billeted in a children's home run by nuns, deputy prosecutor Cristina Camponeschi (Jasmine Trinca) is assigned to the case, along with child psychologist Stefano Mangiaboschi (Michele Riondino). But the victim is intimidated by Cristina's brusque manner and warms to the newly appointed Stefano, who has just returned to Perugia after completing his studies. Giovanni is convinced that Rosa's plight is linked to the Eastern European mafia trade in prostitutes and cocaine, but Cristina is intrigued to find out how she came to the city from France.

In a flashback, we see 15 year-old Rosa Lazar (Angelina Andrei) win a beauty contest in Bucharest, where cousin Sorin persuades her Moldovan mother (Adriana Papana) to let him oversee her bid to become a model. Mrs Lazar is worried that the naively impressionable Rosa will fall into the wrong hands, as gangster Dragan Popescu (Marius Bizou) had tried to tap her up at the venue. But she leaves Buftea in the hopes of emulating a local girl who is now modelling in Paris. During an interview with Stefano, Rosa reveals that her grandfather had been a bigwig in the Communist party, while her father had been jailed for murder. She also shows him how she can write with her foot and Stefano notes that she seems far too cheerful for someone who has been through an ordeal.

Having sent Rosa across Europe on a bus, Sorin meets her in Strasbourg with his girlfriend, Doanna (Anastasia Doaga), who introduces her to a lesbian who works as a prostitute on the German side of the border because clients can be arrested in France. Rosa is excited to be in such a glamorous city and gets her first taste of champagne. But she has no idea what is going on around her, even when the lesbian becomes amorous while they are being filmed dancing together and Sorin has to reminder her not to corrupt Rosa because she is destined for great things.

Rosa repeats the dance for Stefano in his office, as Sister Lucia (Aurora Quattrocchi) tries to snoop at the door. His wife, Susanna Bormoli (Vittoria Puccini), sees the picture that Rosa snapped sitting on Stefano's knee and she worries that he is letting the case get out of hand. But she says nothing, even when Rosa texts him late at night after telling the other girls in the dormitory that he clearly fancies her (and tells them to say nothing, as she doesn't want him to get into any trouble).

Clients at the Aramis nightclub in Strasbourg recognise that Rosa is very young and lives in a dreamworld. Cristina has also latched on to this, but suspects Rosa is shrewder than she appears and follows up her organised crime hunch by putting tails on Louis Garcia (Alain Van Goethem) at the Aramis club and Dragan. Stefano can't decide, however, whether she's playing games or just terrifyingly ingenuous especially after she claims to be looking at photo of herself and her mother on his phone, when the image is of his pet dog. He tells her that things can't be beautiful all the time and she clings to him calling for her mother.

Back in Strasbourg, Sorin is arrested and Doanna has to hand Rosa's passport to one of Dragan's minions. However, Cristina doesn't believe this side of her story and asks Stefano to try to get Rosa to name some names instead of being evasive and claiming no one harmed her. He wants to quit the case and tells Susanna, only for her mother, Flaminia (Francesca Reggiani), to arrive in the middle of the night and wake the twins. She is fascinated by the case and tells Stefano that he should be writing a book.

Sister Lucia complains to Giovanni about Stefano's conduct around Rosa and he asks Cristina to have him removed from the case. He also tells her that he has a bad reputation, as he once smashed a kid in the face. Giovanni also thinks that Susanna abused her position at a surrogacy agency to get her twins. But, as Cristina is under huge pressure to nail Dragan and his trafficking racket, she refuses to sack him, as he is the only one whom Rosa trusts enough to talk to.

Dragan takes Rosa to Brussels, where she meets a member of the European Parliament who wants to spend time with the `Moldovan virgin', even though he is impotent. Back in Perugia, she sees Oncle (Miko Jarry) being interviewed on television and imagines that he tells her that he is going to make her a model in Paris and bring her mother to live with her. This episode is reported to Cristina and Stefano, but Rosa claims not to know Oncle's real name and insists he did nothing indecent to her and that she isn't a whore.

Susanna urges Stefano to withdraw, as she is worried that he is becoming obsessed with Rosa. However, he reassures her that he knows she is a vulnerable child and only wants to help her, as he would their teenage daughter, Teresa (Giulia Rebecca Chiari). When Rosa sees them together on the street, however, she gets jealous and runs through the rain back to the orphanage, where Sister Lucia has barred Stefano from entry because she thinks he's a pervert. Someone also leaks his past to the press and Susanna takes the kids to Flaminia in Rome because she didn't know about his assault incident with a classmate (who had taunted him about his dying mother). But Flaminia asks him three questions down the phone that chear him to her satisfaction and she urges him to keep his story for a book that will sell like hot cakes.

Cristina is angry with Giovanni for persecuting Stefano and insists he brings Rosa to her office. They show her photographs of prominent MEPs and she flinches when she sees Oncle. As she has no proof of them being together, however, they can't press any charges. Unable to hack into the Cloud to retrieve data from Rosa's missing phone, Cristina despairs, until she gets hold of a password.

The phone was lost when Dragan sold Rosa to some Albanian gangsters because Oncle had become so obsessed with her that the situation was becoming dangerous. One of her handlers had felt sorry for Rosa and helped her make contact with Nadja, a famous Romanian model whose father had worked for Rosa's grandfather. She is shooting a commercial that requires her to fly on a harness through a disc of feathers and she tells Rosa to wait for her, having presented her with a new wardrobe. But the teenager is abducted from the changing-room and bundled into a van and taken the Perugia hideaway of Adriatik (Antonio Scarpa). He is nervous about her being a virgin (because they bring bad luck) and the rumours she is a witch. So, his henchmen cut the cards to see who gets to deflower Rosa, but the winner spares her by running a blade through the palm of his hand to bloody his shirt. When she goes out on the streets with the other girls, she is told to run and that's how she came to be found in the ditch.

Having slept with Stefano (who had realised that she had been nursing a broken heart), Cristina is informed that the IT unit has found her evidence on the Cloud, as Rosa had taken selfies with all of the men who had paid to see her, including Oncle, who turns out to be the President of the European Parliament. Commended by her superior, Cristina gives Giovanni the order to make local arrests, while forces in France, Germany, and beyond pick up 38 traffickers from the names and addresses found in the phone files.

Time passes and Stefano returns to Perugia after the publication of his book. Sister Lucia allows him into the orphanage on Rosa's birthday. But she is on medication and is disappointed to discover that her visitor is not her mother. Taken aback by her dispassionate reaction, but still wishing to help her, Stefano meets with Cristina and she arranges for him to collect Rosa's mother so that they can be reunited in Italy. She offers to cook him one of her chickens (which Rosa has always told him were infected) and he smiles in declining. But they go inside her simple house, so she can pack a few belongings for her trip.

Echoes of Agnès Varda's Vagabond (1985) reverberate around this involving, but discomfiting drama and, on the evidence of her debut display, Angelina Andrei has the talent to follow in the footsteps of Sandrine Bonnaire. She is mesmerising as the winsome, but callow teenager, who drifts through life with a guileless delight that makes her unable to discern the dubious motives of those around her. Her performance is all the more impressive, as she persuades the audience to go along with some of the screenplay's more convoluted passages.

Archibugi and her co-writers allow themselves to become bogged down in places, while the flashbacking structure can sometimes feel cumbersome. The action can also occasionally seem cluttered, as minor characters flit in and out when the time might have been better devoted to the reasons for Cristina's melancholy and Giovanni's bitterness. Stefano's violent misdemeanour becomes something of a MacGuffin, as does the truth about his twins. But the decision to give the good guys murky sides and copious contradictions renders them more human and their efforts to do the right thing while carrying the baggage of past mistakes makes them more intriguing.

There's an stiflingly queasy tension to Michele Riondino's scenes with Andrei, as she clings trustingly to him and he tries to support her without overstepping the boundaries. Every now and then, Stefano appears conflicted and it might have been more interesting to examine how the case messes with his mind than to have him tumble into bed with Cristina (in a scene that makes him look creepy) or be browbeaten into penning a bestseller by his mother-in-law. The typically excellent Jasmine Trinca might have been given more to do, especially as Cristina is conspicuously the only woman in the chain of command from the prosecutor down to the deputy commissioner.

In addition to intelligently forging the connections between power and exploitation, toxic masculinity and female fragility, and organised crime and corruptible officialdom, Archibugi also condemns the enduring East/West divide in Europe. Having Oncle be so prominent in the European Parliament feels a bit contrived, but the balance between social drama and psychological thriller is deftly maintained. Francesco Di Giacomo's photography capably contrasts the look and feel of Buftea, Strasbourg, Brussels, and Perugia, while editor Esmeralda Calabria handles the numerous shifts between time and place with clipped efficiency, as Archibugi avoids sensationalism while coaxing an exceptional performance out of Angelina Andrei. It will be fascinating to see how her cinematic journey unfolds.

LEONORA IN THE MORNING LIGHT.

One suspects that director Thor Klein would choose `niche biography' as his specialist subject on Mastermind. Having profiled Polish scientist Stanisław Ulam (1909-84) in Adventures of a Mathematician (2021), he has now teamed with Lena Vurma on Leonora in the Morning, which the German-Swiss pair have adapted from a biographical novel by journalist-cum-artist Elena Poniatowska about British-Mexican artist, Leonora Carrington. No relation to Dora Carrington, who was played by Emma Thompson in Christopher Hampton's Carrington (1995), Leonora was a Lancastrian Surrealist, who worked in 1930s Paris before making a new postwar life for herself in Mexico City, where she remained until her death at the age of 94 in 2011.

In 1951, Leonora Carrington (Olivia Vinall) is driven to Xilitla by Hungarian photographer husband, Emerico `Chiki' Weisz (István Téglás), to stay with Edward James (Ryan Cage), who is creating sculptures for his botanical garden at Las Pozas. She overhears them discussing her mental health and alluding to traumas that she has endured. On a visit to the gardens, a folk song transports Leonora back to Paris in 1938, where she had moved in with painter Max Ernst (Alexander Scheer), who was almost twice the 20 year-old's age.

He had presented her with a white rocking horse to replace the one that had been burned during her childhood by her strict father, who disliked her talking to animals. Her reminiscence reminds him of a pet parrot that had died the morning his sister was born and he confides that the bird's spirit still communes with him. Ernst's wife refuses to divorce him, but Leonora only wants him as a lover and she would channel the sensations from their vigorous love making into her art.

Leonora has little time for the pompous `femme enfant' spoutings of André Breton (Denis Eyriey), but she enjoys the mischief making of Salvador Dali (Cat Jugravu) at the Surrealist soirées, where she despairs of the male chauvinism on display with Catalan artist Remedios Varo (Cassandra Ciangherotti), who has fled the Spanish Civil War. They mock the Surrealist idealisation of women, as they still expect their muses to cook and do the laundry. Seeing a fox on the street on their way home from the gathering, Ernst takes this as a sign that things are about to change.

They buy a house in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche, where they skinny dip and feed each other grapes on the hot rocks. Leonora poses for Ernst and they make a bas-relief on an outside wall. But she is bitter when he returns to Paris when his wife falls ill and invites Remedios to stay with her. A Tarot reading unnerves Leonora, who informs Ernst that she is running out of patience with him. No sooner has she spoken, however, than gendarmes arrive at the door to arrest the German as an enemy alien and Leonora is distraught. She lies naked on the roof tiles, shielding her eyes from the glare, and starts sketching on the whitewashed walls. The cat talks to her and she is in quite a state when Remedios comes to smuggle her out of France in May 1940 - because Ernst is still in detention and the invading German forces are everywhere.

Upset at having to leave the cat behind, Leonora crosses into Spain. How she reached Santander is gradually explained during sessions with Dr Luis (Luis Gerardo Méndez) between bouts of electro-shock therapy. Found on the street in Madrid, Leonora was sent to the clinic by her father and we see flashbacks to her childhood at Crookhey Hall in Cockerham, where the young girl (Wren Stembridge) is taught about spirits that can inhabit animals and trees by her Irish nanny. A wealthy textile merchant, Harold Carrington expected his daughter to learn how to please a husband and was exceedingly displeased by the rebellion that took her to art school and thence to Paris.

When not convulsing on a gurney, Leonora refuses food and shows brusque disdain for the staff. She is told to write about or sketch her experiences by Dr Luis, who urges her to take responsibility for the breakdown that he feels was entirely her own doing. Impacted by the shock treatment, she has dreams about her father being mauled behind the desk in his office by a ravenous cur. As she comes round, she hears Dr Luis say that she will be released in a week.

Fast forward a few years to Leonora trying to work, while raising a son in Mexico City with Weisz. James tries to arrange an exhibition for her, but the gallerist says her European style doesn't have many takers among local collectors. She is sullen and evasive when she runs into Remedios in the market and returns home to have a panic attack when she finds her husband and son aren't there. They have merely gone out and she confides her anxiety to Remedios when they meet next day in a building where the Spaniard is painting a mural. She agrees to keep the secret of Leonora's wartime ordeal, but confronting it prompts her to lock herself in her room and work feverishly, with even James being unable to coax her out.

Accepting an exhibition, Leonora talks about her mother painting biscuit boxes and her dread of having spent a life saying `I wish I had' at the start of each sentence. But she gets paranoid when she sees Remedios chatting to Chiki and accuses her of betraying her secret. This leads to a scene and Leonora going to stay in Xilitla, where she overhears James promising Weisz that he will take care of his wife, as he had no idea she had been though such torment.

Riding back in a cart in darkness from the gardens, Leonora follows an animal into the jungle after a horse is scared in the convoy. She finds her way to a waterfall and a monument that local woman Ximena tells her was built by the priestesses who ran the settlement at Temtoc in ancient times. She suggests that Leonora is like the animals and this seems to free her of her angst and she is seen setting up an easel, as captions inform us that she led a long life blending Surrealist and Mesoamerican influences in her distinctive style of art that celebrated female spirituality.

What a missed opportunity this is. Leonora Carrington is a fascinating figure; Britain's Frida Kahlo in some respects. Yet this biopic reveals so little about her and her art that it may as well be a film à clef. Even then, Klein and Vurma presume considerable foreknowledge, as they leave so many key incidents from Carrington's life off screen so that only those in the know will understand the consequences that they have chosen to depict. The co-directors plunge into Carrington's affair with Max Ernst without bothering to say how they met and why she would come to Paris to break up his marriage without a thought for his wife. Similarly, Ernst just drops out of the story after his arrest, when it wouldn't have killed the film-makers to have alluded to his marriage to Peggy Guggenheim in the same casual manner that they referred to Carrington's marriage of convenience to Mexican diplomat, Renato Leduc.

Most egregiously, Klein and Vurma skirt over Carrington's hideous tribulations in Spain. It's one thing to have her crossing the border with Remedios Vara when she actually travelled with friend Catherine Yarrow, but to make no mention of the reason for her being institutionalised in Santander is baffling. Despite putting up fierce resistance, she was abducted and gang-raped by a band of Spanish soldiers before being dumped in a park. She describes the incident in graphic detail in her memoir, Down Below, although this segment was edited out of the French edition and it feels as though Carrington has been censored all over again here. Even if they wisely opted not to show the assault, Klein and Vurma should surely have referenced it rather than turning it into a whispered confidence between Carrington and Varo after their reunion in Mexico City.

More might have been made of Carrington's relationship with Edward James, as the viewer needs to know why Chiki Weisz would entrust his wife to the flamboyant creator of Las Pozas while she was in the depths of a psychological crisis. All the more so, as James isn't shown having any in-depth conversations with her outside agreeing to sponsor the exhibition that poses the co-directors another problem, as they show next to nothing of Carrington's art, presumably because they couldn't afford the rights (and budgetary restrictions also probably explain the decision not to stage the bizarre episode that saw her parents send her nanny in a submarine to rescue her). The absence of canvases leaves a massive hole at the centre of their story, as their express intention is to show how her experiences inspired her work. Instead, Klein and Vurma seem less interested in her paintings than in name dropping, indulging in bohemian posturing, and wallowing in a vulnerable woman's misery.

Sporting one of the two hairstyles that define the callow and the cannier Carrington, Belgian actress Olivia Vinall is occasionally shown at an easel. She capably conveys a sense of artistic intensity, while she handles the induced convulsion scenes with harrowing authenticity. For the most part, however, she merely enacts scenes with enigmatic spikiness rather than creating a character, although her monotone line readings are largely down to the lifeless purple prose that rarely suggests inner turmoil, intellectual heft, or even human frailty. The quality of the supporting performances also varies drastically, although this again owes much to fact that the sketchy limning reduces significant historical figures to caricatures.

All of which is a great shame, as there's no doubting the sincerity of a project that benefits in seeking poetic poignancy from Tudor Vladimir Panduru's atmospheric photography, as well Gudrun Leyendecker's thoughtful costumes. The less said about the rabid creature that mauls Carrington's father the better, however, although the animal sound effects throughout are pretty ropey throughout and they help undermine a factually selective and dramatically inert portrait of a talented, pioneering, and courageous woman, who deserves much better.

NO PLACE FOR FOOTBALL.

One of the questions always asked about a successful team that plays elegant football is, `ah yes, but could they do it on a cold, wet Tuesday in Stoke?' Even playing 200 miles inside the Arctic Circle at FK Bodø/Glimt would be a doddle, however, compared to battling the elements in Greenland, as Brandon and Derek Smith reveal in their documentary, No Place For Football, which is now streaming on digital platforms. Offering a unique insight into how the beautiful game is played in one of its remotest outposts, this is the ideal way to fill the gap between the end of the club season and the start of the World Cup.

Despite being the world's biggest island, Greenland only has a population of 57,000, which matches the capacity of SV Hamburg's Volksparkstadion. None of the teams playing in the Greenlandic Football Championship would ever dream of gracing such a venue. But nothing UEFA has to offer can compare to the compressed excitement of the annual play-offs, in which the top eight teams compete in two groups of four to provide the semi-finalists who will go on to the league title decider. And, because of the territory's inclement weather conditions, the finalists must play five games in a single week. Can you imagine the fuss that Mikel Arteta would make over such fixture congestion?

Based in the capital, Nuuk, Boldklubben af 1967 (aka B-67) is the most successful team in the competition's history, with 13 wins to its name by the start of the 2022 season. However, they have to travel to the host city of Ilulissat, in order to compete for the Golden Tuukkaq, the medallion awarded to the winners of the Greenlandic Football Championship. Granted access to the B-67 training ground, the Smiths get to meet skipper Patrick Frederiksen, as well as teammates Søren Kreutzmann, Karsten Møller Andersen, Aiko Nielsen, Aqqalooraq Møller-Lund, Niklas Kleist,

Morten Fleischer, and Niels Svane. They have qualified for the finals by topping the local Sermersooq round robin. But manager Jimmy Holm Jensen is unable to make finals week, leaving the door open for assistant coach Nicolai Nielsen to take over.

Hailing from Denmark, where he played and took his coaching badges, Nielsen is something of an outsider, even more so since his girlfriend broke up with him shortly into their stay. Having nothing better to do, however, he is able to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of the B-67 squad and puts them through extra defensive training, although it's not always easy fitting sessions around the work schedules of the players. He also needs to get his unpaid team to start taking things more seriously, if they are to take the first championship after a two-year break for Covid.

The Smiths also meet Morten Rutkjaer, the national team coach who seems to think that Greenland is bigger than Europe, and Lena Ravn Davidson, the chair of Nagdlunguaq-48 (aka N-48), the biggest team in Ilulissat who are keen to retain the Golden Tuukkaq they had won in 2019. However, N-48 find themselves in the same group as B-67, along with Tupilak-41 (T-41) and UB-83 Upernavik (UB-83). On the other side of the draw, Group 1 is made up of G-44 Qeqertarsuaq (G-44), Inuit Timersoqatigiiffiat-79 (IT-79), Kissaviarsuk-33 (K-33), and Siumut Amerdlok Kunuk (SAK). We don't see much action from their tussles, but they finish in listing order to see G-44 and It-79 into the semis.

As Greenland is so vast and the ground is covered in snow and ice for long periods of the year, distance travel is undertaken by air or sea. However, conditions are so poor in the run-up to the tournament that B-67's squad is stranded in Kangerlusuaq after the cancellation of a flight and Nielsen is forced to leave half of them behind in order to get himself and 10 players to Ilulissat in order to avoid disqualification.

In the meantime, the Smiths drop in on the N-48 camp to make the acquaintance of manager Isak Hoy and his star players Lars-Erik Reimer and Rene-Eriksen Petersen. Playing on home astro-turf, they top the standings after beating UB-83 by 10-1 and T-41 by 3-0. The former would lose 3-6 in their game with T-41, but would hold the 10 men of B-67 to 0-0 in the first half of their clash. After stern words from Nielsen, however, the Nuuk side crashed in seven unanswered goals before waiting for news of their missing players.

Selflessly, Patrick Frederiksen remained behind with another teammate after eight seats became available on a flight to Ilulissat. However, he managed to arrive at the ground, with B-67 trailing 0-1 to N-48 in the big showdown. Despite the skipper coming on at the start of the second half, however, his team couldn't draw level and they went into their final group game needing a win to come second. Having walked to the ground, they enjoyed a slick 5-0 triumph over T-41, who had to wear yellow bibs because of a colour clash and they didn't have a second strip. Coach Nielsen even came off the bench to score, as B-67 progressed to a semi-final with G-44, while IT-79 awaited N-48 in the other.

Taking a stroll to view the icebergs off the coast, the team seem relaxed going into the game, conducting interviews with each other and joking that Nielsen resembles Ted Lasso. With their nerves settled by an early goal (described in typically understated terms by commentator Noah Mølgaard), B-67 go on to win 6-0. By contrast, N-48 squeak in 2-1 to set up the game the whole of Greenland had wanted.

Injuries have reduced Nielsen's options, but he is so confident that they can triumph that he has promised to get a tattoo. He gives a rousing team talk before the kick-off in front of a large crowd and it pays off when Søren Kreutzmann scores an early goal. The balance seems to tip further when N-48's Reimer goes off on a stretcher. But it remains 0-1 at half-time and a red card gives N-48 hope. However, they only grab an equaliser after a goalmouth scramble and Nielsen goes apoplectic when the referee sends of Aiko Nielsen for diving on a yellow card, when he plainly seems to have been tripped.

As the game goes into extra time, N-48 seem to have the edge. But it's B-67 who take the lead, when the goalkeeper misjudges a free kick that drops under his bar. The green shirts swarm forward, but the blue wall holds firm until the last 30 seconds of the second half, when a speculator creeps under the B-67 keeper and the match goes to penalties. It's 4-4 at the end of five kicks, with N-48 putting the last kick over the bar. However, B-67 miss at 5-5 to see the title stay in Ilulissat. The touchline seems a lonely place for players a long way from home, as local fans invade the pitch. But an emotional Nielsen tells the huddle of his pride before phonecam footage shows the celebrations from 2023, when B-67 reclaimed the Golden Tuukkaq. They have since won it twice more and they will go for four in a row in August.

Closing captions note that the championship will be the biggest thing in Greenlandic football until UEFA or FIFA change their stance on Kalaallit Nunaat's status. As it's an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, Grønland cannot apply for membership in the same was as Andorra, San Marino, or even the Faroe Islands (an archipelago that is also a Danish `rigsdel'). It might have been interesting to follow this thread, as the structuring of domestic football has often been cited as one of the reasons why FIFA and UEFA have refused to give Greenland international clearance. However, the Scotts opt to focus on B-67's journey to the 2022 final and it still makes for revealing and entertaining viewing. Moreover, it leaves a lingering sense of melancholy, as it's highly unlikely that this splendidly singular competition would continue to flourish if the Big Orange Manbaby ever got his way over sovereignty.

A bit more background on the featured players might have rounded them out as characters, but we only get to see Pato Frederiksen (the only Black player on view) with his partner and child. The makers are also discinclined to assess the standard of Greenlandic football, as we only see highlights that have been cobbled together by editor Jocelyn Chaput from the Scott brothers' juddering guerrilla footage (their views of the frozen scenery, by contrast, are composed and spectacular). But it's still eye-opening to see several outfield players carrying a few additional pounds and wearing leggings against the summer chill, as run around with the enthusiasm of park amateurs in straining every sinew to get the ball to those teammates who can actually play. Furthermore, those tiring of the incessant yattering of TV's current crop of pub bore commentators and their old pro sidekicks would probably wish for more games to be called in the delightfully incidental style of Noah Mølgaard, who gets our Man of the Tournament award.

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