Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 17/10/2013)

Artistic anguish is also the theme of Camille Claudel 1915, a period biopic that marks something of a departure for austerity auteur Bruno Dumont. However, this couldn't be more different to Bruno Nuytten's Camille Claudel (1989), which earned an Oscar nomination for Isabelle Adjani. It still features a major star, however, as Juliette Binoche plays the 50 year-old sculptress as she questions why she has been incarcerated in the asylum at Montdevergues outside Avignon when she is perfectly convinced of her sanity. She blames Auguste Rodin, who had been her lover two decades earlier. But it is her brother Paul (Jean-Luc Vincent) who has had her committed and her furious rows with him and her doctor (Robert Leroy) contrast with her more lucid interactions with her fellow inmates, who, somewhat contentiously are played by actual mental health patients. Working in Paris for the first time, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi examines more family tensions in The Past, as Ali Mosaffa arrives from Tehran to end his tempestuous marriage to estranged wife Bérénice Bejo. However, he becomes intrigued by the nature of her relationship with future spouse Tahar Rahim after a chance remark by his teenage daughter, Pauline Burlet, who disapproves of the liaison and the fact she is often left to care for younger siblings Jeanne Jestin and Elyes Aguis. Cast in the same `detective story' vein as his Oscar-winning drama, A Separation (2011), this is another meticulously modulated study of the secrets and lies that are often so vital to keeping the lid on home truths.

Another Parisian teen tests the how far she can push her luck in François Ozon's Jeune et jolie, as 17 year-old Marine Vacth returns home after losing her virginity during a holiday fling with German hunk Lucas Prisor and sets up a website advertising her escort services at €300 a visit. She soon has a number of clients and enjoys her new-found wealth and power. But an incident with regular Johan Leysen causes her to quit and she finds herself being forced to consult psychiatrist Serge Hefez after mother Géraldine Pailhas and stepfather Frédéric Pierrot discover her guilty secret. Charlotte Rampling contributes a grandmaternal cameo to this variation on Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour (1967) echoes the youthful misadventures experienced by the ensemble in Cédric Klapisch's Pot Luck (2002) and Russian Dolls (2005). In Chinese Puzzle, however, anti-hero Romain Durais has hit 40 and is facing up to the prospect of relocating to New York to be near ex-wife Kelly Reilly and their children. Audrey Tautou also returns for the latest instalment, which also features Cécile De France, Sandrine Holt and Kevin Bishop.

The LFF Gallic strand has always afforded a showcase for women directors and six have new pictures on view this year. Catherine Breillat demonstrates typical self-reflexive courage in adapting her 2009 book Abuse of Weakness, as it fictionalises her relationship with swindler Christophe Rocancourt, whom she planned to star in a film while recovering from a paralysing stroke in 2004. Isabelle Huppert and rapper Kool Shen take on the character of the artist seeking to exert a measure of control after her life was so cruelly disrupted and the chancer who preyed upon the vulnerability of his new friend to his own monetary advantage. But, this being à clef life rather than contrived fiction, the balance of the power is not quite as tilted as it first appears, as Breillat not only explores her own failings, but also the nature of will, perversity and creativity.

Elsewhere, Anne Fontaine makes her English-language debut with Adore, a Christopher Hampton-scripted adaptation of the Doris Lessing story, `The Grandmothers', which stars Naomi Watts and Robin Wright as lifelong friends who fall for each other's strapping sons, Samuel and James Frechevile, during a mad, hot summer on Australia's East coast. Catherine Deneuve plays another middle-aged woman unsure how to cope with her changing circumstances in Emmanuelle Bercot's On My Way, as her Breton restaurant owner walks out in the middle of the lunchtime rush after her partner dumps her for a younger woman and, following a hectic fling with stranger Paul Hamy, she finds herself driving to the south-east at the request of estranged daughter Camille in order to deposit grandson Nemo Schiffman with paternal grandfather, Gérard Garouste.

Impetuous decisions also drive the action in Katell Quillévéré's Suzanne, as Sara Forestier gets pregnant at 15 and not only decides to keep the baby, but also to stay living with widowed trucker father François Damiens and younger sister Adèle Haenel. However, when Forestier falls for small-time Marseilles thug Paul Hamy, she changes the family dynamic forever. Tahar Rahim also threatens to break up a happy home in Rebecca Zlotowski's Grand Central, as he lands a job at a nuclear power plant and develops a crush on workmate Denis Menochet's fiancée, Léa Seydoux. However, despite the reassurances of supervisor Olivier Gourmet, Rahim quickly becomes aware of the risks of radiation contamination and he subjects himself to a dangerously high dose while rescuing Seydoux during an accident on site. And matters of life and death also concern Valeria Golino in her directorial debut, Honey, an adaptation of a book by Angela Del Fabbro that sees Jasmine Trinca act as a conduit between those with terminal illnesses seeking assisted suicide and her medic ex-lover Libero Di Rienzo. However, she undergoes a dramatic change of heart when she encounters Carlo Cecchi, an architect who is simply lost the will to carry on.

Another shocking incident gives Pierre Deladonchamps pause for thought in Alain Guiraudie's thriller, Stranger By the Lake. However, just as he cannot resist the intellectual companionship offered by portly divorcé Patrick D'Assumçao after they meet at an idyllic lakeside cruising spot, so he is unable to shake his fixation with the strapping Christophe Paou, even after he witnesses him drown casual pick-up François Labarthe after a tussle in the bushes. This meditation on love, sex, voyeurism and violence finds a companion piece in Eastern Boys, Robin Campillo's treatise on desire, solitude, territory and belonging that sees besuited fiftysomething Olivier Rabourdin descend upon the Gare du Nord and arrange an assignation with Ukrainian teenager Kirill Emelyanov. But, when he opens the door the following evening, Emelyanov is followed in by menacing pimp Daniil Vorobyov and he rest of his charges, who promptly take over. A few days later, however, Emelyanov returns to keep his bargain and Rabourdin becomes increasingly concerned for the deracinated youth's safety.

An amour fou of an even more reckless kind occupies Guillaume Brac's feature bow, Tonnerre, as 33 year-old rock musician Vincent Macaigne becomes besotted with 21 year-old provincial reporter Solène Rigot after he leaves behind the bustle of Paris to visit widowed father Bernard Menez. However, Macaigne loses his cool when Rigot decides to end their three-day fling and he steals a gun in order to kidnap her. Macaigne gets caught up in another crime in Sébastien Betbeder's sophomore outing, 2 Autumns 3 Winters, as a late-night mugging reunites him with Maud Wyler, whom he has often seen while jogging. But, just as their relationship seems to be blossoming as well as stroke victim best friend Bastien Bouillon and physical therapist Audrey Bastien, another medical emergency throws a spanner in the works. Replete with references to Robert Bresson, Alain Tanner, Eugène Green and Judd Apatow, as well as the nouvelle vague, this is a romcom for laddish cineastes (and we all know how many of them there are out there).

By contrast, Martin Provost opts for a more traditional approach in Violette, a cerebral study of feminist icon Violette Leduc, who found fame in 1964 with her fearlessly self-exposing memoir, La Bâtarde. However, this biopic focuses on the immediate postwar era when Leduc (Emmanuelle Devos) is working as a black marketeer and posing as the wife of gay, half-Jewish writer Maurice Sachs (Olivier Py). But, on becoming acquainted with the writing of Simone De Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), Leduc is inspired to produce L'Asphyxie, which so impresses De Beauvoir that she introduces her to such high-powered friends as Jean Genet (Jacques Bonaffé) and Jacques Guérin (Olivier Gourmet). But the bisexual Leduc, who endures a hellish relationship with her mother, Berthe (Catherine Hiegel), wants more.

Claude Lanzmann returns to a similar period in The Last of the Unjust, a postscript to his monumental account of the Holocaust, Shoah (1985), which is based around an unused interview that he filmed in Rome in 1975 with 70 year-old Viennese rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the sole surviving member of the Jewish Council appointed by the Nazis to help run the ghetto camp at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Condemned after the war as a collaborator, Murmelstein was acquitted, but insisted to his death in 1989 that he was left with no option but to strike a bargain with the Third Reich and Lanzmann retraces his steps to assess his claims in this sombre investigation into the hideous choices so many Jews had to make in the face of murderous tyranny. Challenging Hannah Arendt's contention that Adolf Eichmann personified the `banality of evil', Murmelstein is a gifted raconteur, who describes himself as both `a calculating realist' and `a marionette that had to pull its own strings' in explaining how he helped 120,000 Jews leave the country and prevented Theresienstadt from being liquidated. But Lanzmann refuses to give him an easy ride and the ferocity of their discussion is made all the more moving by the inspired use of clips from Nazi propaganda films and sketches by Jewish artists who buried their work to prevent its confiscation.

The other French documentaries on show cannot hope to compete in terms of gravity. But Nicolas Philibert's La Maison de la Radio and Philippe Béziat's Becoming Traviata are fascinating in their own right. The former offers a behind-the-scenes look at the operation of the different channels sponsored by Radio France at its state-of-the-art headquarters in Paris. Demonstrating once again his mastery of the observational technique, Philibert captures the broadcasting of breakfast and drive-time shows, as well as dramas, quizzes, magazine programmes, sportscasts and the full range of musical offerings. But, fascinating though the studio sessions are, especially when they include such `name' guests as Jean-Claude Carrière, Jan Houben, Antonio Placer, Maïa Vidal and Pierre Bastien, the sequences profiling producer Marguerite Gateau, news desk editor Marie-Claude Rabot-Panson, classical music specialist Frédéric Lodéon and current affairs presenter Alain Bedouet capture the essence of radio and make typically astute Philibertian contrasts between language, facial expression and milieu. Béziat travels to Aix-en-Provence to watch Jean François Sivadier direct a festival production of Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata. Collaborating with conductor Louis Langrée, Sivadier takes Natalie Dessay, Charles Castronovo and Ludovic Tézier through his conception of the opera and the way in which he sells ideas to Dessay in particular is both revealing and often amusing, as the coloratura soprano sometimes looks baffled by his vaguer suggestions. But, as preparations for opening night proceed apace, a combination of inspiration and dedication ensures that the cast, chorus and orchestra have acquired such a thorough understanding of the piece that even the rehearsal of isolated scenes are as polished and potent as they would be in full performance.

Fact is also very much to the fore in Philippe Godeau's 11.6, which draws on a book by Alice Géraud-Arfi to recreate the audacious 2009 heist of €11.6 million in banknotes by armoured car driver Tony Musulin. Played by François Cluzet, he comes across as an ordinary man, who lived with his bar-owning girlfriend Marion (Corinne Masiero) and frequently intervened to prevent maverick partner Arnaud (Bouli Lanners) from being teased by their workmates. Unlike Sean Ellis's Metro Manila, the motives for the robbery are never entirely clear cut, despite Cluzet becoming increasingly frustrated by the penny-pinching tactics of his corporate employers. Belgium's other contribution is more stylised, as Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani pay homage to 1970s psychedelic Euro horror with The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, as Klaus Tange returns to his art nouveau Brussels apartment block to discover that wife Ursula Bedena has mysteriously disappeared. However, a similar thing happened to the husband of seventh-floor resident Birgit Yew and she offers to help Tange with a search that becomes increasingly bizarre right up to its disconcerting revelation.

The peerless Alex van Warmerdam ventures into the dark side with more of a wink than a glare in Borgman, which chronicles the effect that fugitive bogeyman Jan Bijvoet has on middle-class Dutch couple Hadewych Minis and Jeroen Perceval and their three children, not to mention their live-in nanny and gardener, when he forcibly avails himself of their hospitality and, together with his cultish cabal, sets about making a few changes. Curiously, a domestic realignment occurs in the other Dutch picture on show, Nanouk Leopold's It's All So Quiet, a loose adaptation of Gerbrand Bakker's bestseller, The Twin, that opens with fiftysomething farmer Jeroen Willems moving elderly father Henri Garcin into an attic room so he can make a delayed start on living his own life. Yet, while he is tempted by liaisons with milk-truck driver Wim Opbrouck and new hand Martijn Lakemeier, Willems never quite feels the master of his own destiny.

The absence of patriarchal authority was the key to the Friedrichshof sex commune established in the 1970s by Otto Muehl, the controversial founder of the Viennese Actionist Art movement. His idea was that children born without knowing the identity of their father would develop more individually and become more creative. However, Paul-Julien Robert, who spent the first 12 years of his life within the community, is not entirely convinced and, in My Fathers, My Mother and Me, he invites his mother and other alumni to reconsider Muehl's core principles. This is Austria's sole contribution to LFF 57 and, somewhat unusually, there is also only one German feature on show, although the country does have several co-production credits and a couple of entries in the Archive selection. The fact that Philip Gröning's The Police Officer's Wife runs for 175 minutes goes some way to compensating, however, as its 59 chapters chart the relationship between cop David Zimmerschied and his devoted wife, Alexandra Finder, who is teaching their young daughter (played by twins Pia and Chiara Kleemann) about the world around her and her place in it. But, as the bruises on Finder's body testify, this scene of idyllic domesticity is a sham. And nothing is quite what it seems in Erik Skjoldbjærg's 1980s conspiracy thriller, Pioneer, as sibling divers Aksel Hennie and Andre Eriksen sign up to assist the laying of a pipeline that will pump gas and oil 500 miles across the North Sea to the Norwegian coastline. However, the meticulous preparation fails to prevent a catastrophe and Hennie is torn between blowing the whistle on the incompetence of Wes Bentley's operation and missing out on the boom that seems set to follow.

Risk taking would appear to be something of a Norwegian pastime, as Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg suggest in Kon Tiki, which reconstructs the epic 1947 balsa raft crossing from Peru to Polynesia that explorer and anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl hoped would prove that a similar journey had been made across 4300 miles of ocean in pre-Columbian times. Leaving behind wife Liv (Agnes Kittelsen) on the remote isle of Fatu Huku, Heyerdahl (Pål Sverre Hagen) - who can't even swim - sets out with a crew of five, including refrigerator salesman Herman Watzinger (Anders Baasmo Christiansen) as his engineer and Swede Bengt Danielsson (Gustaf Skarsgård) as his cameraman. But the durability of the hemp holding the craft together soon becomes as much of an issue as the fierce storms and omnipresent sharks.

Another Norwegian abroad proves to be markedly less heroic in Eirik Svensson's debut, Must Have Been Love, as Espen Klouman Høiner doesn't even recognised Finn Pamela Tola when she bumps into him after taking a job in Oslo. But can she be entirely certain that, despite the physical similarities, he is really the man with whom she enjoyed an enchanting romance while on holiday in Istanbul? If this doesn't quite live up to Alain Resnais's Last Year At Marienbad (1961) that's it doesn't try to. And, similarly, Dane Ask Hasselbalch doesn't seek to compete with Hollywood kidpix in Antboy, in which 12 year-old nobody Oscar Dietz gets bitten by a genetically modified ant and, with the help of a costume designed by comic-book nerd Samuel Ting Graf, he begins using his powers to fight crime. Such is his success, the school play is even entitled Antboy: The Musical. But all Dietz wants to do is impress classmate Amalie Kruse Jensen and his chance arrives when a supervillain named The Flea (Nicolas Bro) attempts to abduct her for a ransom.

Scandinavia has a proud reputation for producing fine films for younger audiences and Lukas Moodysson does his bit to uphold it with We Are the Best!, which he has adapted with his wife Coco from her semi-autobiographical graphic novel. Set in Stockholm in the early 1980s, the action centres on 13 year-olds Mira Barkhammar and Mira Grosin, who refuse to believe that punk is dead and set about forming their own band. However, as neither of them can play an instrument, they decide to recruit fellow outsider Liv LeMoyne, who proved herself a fine classical guitarist in the school talent show. Her staunch Christian beliefs lead to some initial tensions, as they try to write riot grrrl songs about rebellion, feminism and political activism. But the chance to play at a Christmas concert at the local community centre concentrates their minds wonderfully. It's often said that modern kids don't know they're born. But, as Jessica Oreck reveals in Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys, even reindeer herders in Finnish Lapland now have a Wii to pass the long winter evenings. However, there is no escaping the arduousness of the seasonal chores undertaken by brothers Aarne and Lasse Aatsinki and, while this awe-inspiringly austere study may not always approve of their slaughtering methods or growing reliance on modern technogy, it also lauds the skill involved in their craft and the hardiness required to care for their majestic animals in forests and fields that are often frozen and inaccessible.

A pair of docudramas bookend the Polish tetraptych at LFF 2013. Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze celebrate the life and work of Roma poet Bronislawa Wajs (1908-87) in Papusza. Some 35,000 Polish Roma were slaughtered during the Second World War and those that survived were forced to give up their ancient customs by the Communist regime and this monochrome chronicle draws on the writings of ethnographer Jerzy Fikowski to recapture the rhythms of the Roma lifestyle and explore how Fikowski (Antoni Pawlicki) encouraged Wajs (Jowita Budnik) to write and published some of her verses in 1951 before she was voted out of the clan after it was felt his monograph, Polish Gypsies, betrayed too many of their secrets. Wajs died shortly after Lech Walesa and his Solidarity trade union changed Poland forever. There can be no more fitting biographer for this Nobel laureate and national hero than Andrzej Wajda and Walesa: Man of Hope is fulsome tribute than spans the period from the suppression of the workers' protests in 1970 and the collapse of authoritarianism in 1989. At the heart of the action is the 1981 interview between Walesa (Robert Wieckiewicz) and Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci (Maria Rosaria Omaggio) that brought the leader of the Gdasnk shipyard workers to international attention. Readily depicting Walesa as a flawed individual, Wajda recalls how he was duped into becoming an informer in 1970, as he struggled to raise six children with wife Danuta (Agnieszka Grochowska). But, as the decade progressed, he started to play a greater part in the protest movement and, following the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979, he emerged as a charismatic leader of the Solidarity union, whose activities led to the imposition of martial law in 1981. Wieckiewicz presents Walesa as an arrogant, under-educated, grandstanding everyman whose championing of the common people was rooted in a mistrust of intellectuals and apparatchiks. But, as he mixes reconstruction with archive footage, the 87 year-old Wajda retains the mix of integrity and steely sincerity that made Man of Marble (1976) and Man of Iron (1981) such masterpieces.

Sandwiched between this pair are Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida and Tomasz Wasilewski's Floating Skyscrapers. The former sees the UK-based director return to his homeland for a story set in the 1960s. Having been raised in a convent, Agata Trzebuchowska is eager to take her vows and become a nun. But mother superior Halina Skoczynska insists that she has a final meeting with her last known relative, her aunt Agata Kulesza, who turns out to be a high-powered judge, who is seeking to drown the recent memory of prosecuting some supposed enemies of the state. She informs Trzebuchowska that she is a Jewish orphan who was rescued during the war. However, the paper trail may not have entirely been destroyed and there is a chance that her true identity may be uncovered. As she processes this news, Trzebuchowska meets musician Dawid Ogrodnik and gains an insight into another life altogether. But her major concern remains the prospect that she may be prohibited from following her chosen path.

Wasilewski claims Floating Skyscrapers is `the first Polish LGBT film'. At its core is the burgeoning friendship between swimmer Mateusz Banasiuk and art student Bartosz Gelner. But the subplots involving the former's mother (Katarzyna Herman) and fiesty girlfriend (Marta Nieradkiewicz) and the latter's parents (Iza Kuna and Miroslaw Zbrojewicz) prove just as crucial to the way the story pans out. Kazakh debutant Emir Baigazin examines how another outsider responds to being ostracised in Harmony Lessons, which follows 13 year-old loner Timur Aidarbekov as he leaves the cocoon of grandmother Bagila Kobenova's farmstead to be picked on by school bully Aslan Anarbayev, who steals cash to support older youths like identical twins Adlet and Daulet Anarbekov. However, inspired by the example of newcomer Mukhtar Andassov and Muslim girl Anelya Adilbekova, Aidarbekov begins plotting how he can resist Anarbayevs reign of terror.

Aleksandr Yatsenko also decides to make a stand in Boris Khlebnikov's A Long and Happy Life, a Russian take on the classic Fred Zinnemann Western, High Noon (1952), in which a city slicker finds himself defending a loss-making farm after corrupt council official Denis Yatkovskiy decides to acquire it for development. But, having been jilted by girlfriend Anna Kotova (who is Yatkovskiy's secretary), Yatsenko soon finds himself being betrayed by the workforce he has sacrificed everything to support. The scene may shift from the autumnal Murmansk countryside to a derelict military base on the Arctic Kola peninsula, but the hardship is just as palpable in Uzbek veteran Yusup Razykov's Shame, which evidently takes its inspiration from the 2000 tragedy when 118 sailors were lost aboard the submarine Kursk. As the wives of submariners await news, newlywed Maria Semenova remains aloof and seeks solace in the arms of a fishing-boat skipper before going in search of the woman who had written so many passionate letters to her missing husband.

The rigours of life along the Trans-Siberian gas link are outlined by Vitaly Manskiy in Pipeline, which was shot in seven countries over 104 days. In following the 2800-mile Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhhorod connection from Western Siberia to Germany, Manskiy witnesses such sights as a wedding in Khabarovsk, a musical performance, a funeral, various festivals and feasts and an Orthodox mass in a disused rail car. He also meets some veterans who look back wistfully on the Stalinist past and lament the lack of opportunity for modern youth. But, even though Manskiy highlights the contrasts between affluence and poverty, he avoids overt politicising. Australian Kitty Green is more forthright, however, as she seeks the truth behind the controversial neo-Situationist activist group, Femen, in Ukraine Is Not a Brothel. Over the course of 14 months, Green got to know leading figures like Inna Shevchenko and Sasha Shevchenko well, as they conducted their famous topless protests against the acquiescence of the Ukrainian authorities in sex trafficking, as well as such international outrages as the detention of Pussy Riot in Russia and the suppression of women's rights in Belarus. But the story is somewhat deflected by Green's discovery that this naive, if courageous organisation was being controlled by the charismatic, but sinister Victor Svyatski.

The asperity of daily life for a Roma family in Bosnia and Herzegovina is laid bare by Danis Tanovic in An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, in which Nazif and Senada Mujic, along with their daughters Sandra and Semsa, relive the events that befell them in 2011 when Senada miscarried and her scrap merchant husband had to try and raise the 980 Bosnian marks for the operation that alone could save her life. Shot in a visceral docudramatic style, this is a harrowing indictment of the plight of the poor in Eastern Europe and Calin Peter Netzer tackles much the same theme in Child's Pose, the Golden Bear winner at this year's Berlin Film Festival, which features an outstanding performance by Luminita Gheorghiu, as the architect who not only tries to bully the police into turning a blind eye to the fact that feckless son Bogdan Dumitrache was speeding when he killed a teenage boy, but who also plays hardball with key witness Vlad Ivanov, Dumitrache's detested girlfriend Ilinca Goia and the victim's grieving parents, Adrian Titieni and Isfan Alexandru. Unfavourably comparing Romania's nouveau riche to the Communist élite, this may be a rather obvious satire, but the dialogue crackles and the ease with which morality is dispensed with as a luxury few can afford is deeply disconcerting.

The desperate circumstances endured by so many in the Second World War are recollected by János Szász in Le Grand Cahier, an adaptation of an Ágota Kristóf novel, in which 13 year-old twins András and László Gyémánt are asked to keep a notebook of their experiences by father Ulrich Matthes before he goes off to fight However, as mother Gyöngyver Bognar is so concerned by the threat of air raids that she dispatches the boys to grandmother Piroska Molnár in the countryside. But she has been turfed out of her farmhouse by Nazi officer Ulrich Thomsen and she proceeds to treat them as her own personal enemy and they turn to Jewish cobbler János Derzsi and the harelipped Orsolya Tóth for solace. Past tragedies seem largely to have been forgotten by the inhabitants of the Slovak town of Stupava in Pavol Korec's Exhibits or Stories From the Castle. But past and present often co-exist for the occupants of the old people's home, who include a lawyer nicknamed `the Classic', a woman who has seen aliens, a philosopher with a taste for neologisms, a zesty fellow with a speedy wheelchair and the taciturn Liduška, who collects pigeon feathers.

An abandoned luxury hotel provides the setting for the debuting Elina Psykou's The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas, a biting allegory on the Greek financial crisis that stars Christos Stergioglou as the ageing host of a morning talk show whose ratings are slipping. Desperate to boost his popularity, he stages his own kidnapping and holes up in an out-of-season spot until the time comes for his fans and the media to celebrate his miraculous release. However, station boss Giorgos Souxes seems more than happy with replacements Syllas Tzoumerkas and Theodora Tzimou, and, so, while watching old tapes and flicking through celebrity magazines, Stergioglou starts to lose touch with reality and his experiments with molecular cookery and karaoke singing become ever more pathetic. Bookish florist Manolis Mavromatakis also takes the law into his own hands in Yorgos Tsemperopoulos's revenge thriller, The Enemy Within, after his suburban home is invaded by masked thugs who terrorise wife Maria Zorba and 17 year-old son Ilias Moulas and rape his 14 year-old daughter, Ariadni Kavalierou. Egged on by paranoid, militarist neighbour Yiorgos Gallos, Mavromatakis abandons his liberal principles and takes to the streets to find the culprits. And the state of the nation is further examined by Michalis Konstantatos in Luton, as overweight 55 year-old mini-mart owner Christos Sapountzis, chic thirtysomething trainee lawyer Eleftheria Komi and privileged high-school student Nicholas Vlachakis find themselves being drawn together by a combination of unforeseen circumstances and their own frustrations, prejudices and diminished aspirations.

A century ago, Europe was experiencing an even more appalling crisis, as the Great War engulfed almost the entire continent. Alphan Eseli recalls the aftermath of the 1915 Battle of Sarikamis in The Long Way Home, which opens with the horse pulling the cart containing Nergis Öztürk and daughter Myraslava Kostyeva keel over and die in the snow. Walking on with Ugur Polat, they pass through some of the 90,000 Turkish soldiers who froze to death during an ill-advised offensive against the Russians and finally reach a remote Eastern Anatolia village, where they find themselves competing for meagre resources with troopers Serdar Orçin and Suha Tezel, Armenian peasant Muharrem Bayrak and Sila Cetindag, who is seeking refuge from a hamlet decimated by the Tsarist forces.

Courage of another sought is commended by Kaveh Bakhtiari in Stop-Over, in which the Iranian director profiles his cousin Moshen, who was trapped in Athens after being duped by the smuggler taking him to Switzerland and was befriended by Amir, a compatriot who has turned his two-room basement apartment in the Greek capital into a sanctuary for other illegal Iranian migrants awaiting the lucky break that will get them to the West. Skirting open condemnation of Greek immigration policies and the impact that the recession has had on the population's lurch to the right, Bakhtiari concentrates on the sense of solidarity and occasional animosity among resourceful men, whose emotions sometimes get the better of them as they chat to relatives back home or those who have made it into Fortress Europe. By contrast, the problems being experienced by 50 year-old conceptual artist Defne Halman may seem hugely insignificant. But, as Lifelong progresses, sophomore director Asli Özge succeeds in coaxing the audience to care about this self-centred and conceited woman, as she frets about her latest exhibition, becomes convinced that architect husband Hakan Çimenser (who designed their minimalist Istanbul home) is having an affair and grows more than a little envious at the fact that student daughter Gizem Arkan is about to move in with her boyfriend Onur Dikmen in Ankara.

Another experimental artist has a crisis of confidence in Daniele Luchetti's semi-autobiographical Those Happy Years, which is set in Rome in the 1970s and follows sculptor Kim Rossi Stuart as he wrestles with a scathing review of his latest work and comes to appreciate wife Micaela Ramazzotti and sons Samuel Garofalo and Niccolò Calvagna after gallery owner Martina Gedeck sweeps them off for a holiday in France and makes a move on the unsuspecting Ramazzotti. Another lesbian couple encounters an immovable objects in Emma Dante's A Street in Palermo, which sees Dante and Alba Rohrwacher take a short-cut down the narrow Via Castellana Bandiera following a row en route to a wedding and find themselves bumper to bumper with a car being driven by elderly Elena Cotta, who is returning from burying her 36 year-old daughter with son-in-law Renato Malfatti and the family of his first wife. As shyster Carmine Maringola begins taking bets on who will budge first, Rohrwacher goes for something to eat with Malfatti's 16 year-old son, while Dante and Cotta sit tight and glare at each other - even during bathroom breaks.

The fact that Cotta hails from the small town of Piana degli Albanesi suggests her Albanian origins and Daniele Gaglianone explores the problems of integrating into Italian society in My Class, in which Valerio Mastandrea plays a teacher giving language lessons to migrants hoping to improve their chances of staying in the country. But, while Mastandrea is taking a role, the students from Turkey, Ukraine, Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Guinea, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Brazil, Peru, the Philippines and Bangladesh tell their own stories with a humility, humanity and humour that can only bridge cultural differences. However, as Gianni Amelio intimates in L'intrepido, it's not just foreigners who are struggling to find a niche in recessional Italy. Indeed, the harder middle-aged Antonio Albanese tries to fit in and work hard, the more difficult he finds it to make headway in a Milan specked with half-finished buildings. Determined to help sax-playing son Gabriele Rendina make it to the conservatory, Albanese helps with the scaffolding on such a site before donning a lion costume to amuse kids in a shopping mall crèche. He also puts up posters (in a nod towards Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, 1948), drives a train, delivers pizzas and does odd jobs in Alfonso Santagata's gym. But he draws the lines at the shady schemes suggested by ex-wife Sandra Ceccarelli's new beau, Giuseppe Antignati, and puts his hope, instead, into a platonic friendship with Livia Rossi, whom he meets while taking an exam for a public sector job.

If Albanese often seems to be going in circles, few of those living along Rome's 43.5-mile ring road have much sense of direction, either, if Gianfranco Rosi's Sacro GRA is to be believed. Among those encountered during a project that was loosely inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and took nearly three years to scout and shoot are an aristocrat and his daughter who have known better times; a paramedic enduring a tough shift; a furniture salesman with some unshiftable stock; a transvestite prostitute bored by her clients; a botanist striving to save some palm trees from a weevil infestation; and an eel fisherman and his Ukrainian wife trying to make a catch in the Tiber.

A hitman and his blind sister would have slotted perfectly into this line-up. But, instead, they play a key role in Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza's first feature, Salvo, which takes us back to Palermo, as assassin Saleh Bakri wipes out the adversaries who have foolishly cornered his car. Having discovered the name of his chief foe, Bakri (who rents a room from married couple Giuditta Perriera and Luigi Lo Cascio) goes to Mario Pupella's place with the express purpose of killing him. However, he is not at home and Bakri finds himself confronted with his blind sister, Sara Serraiocco, who is cheerfully counting money in the basement. Taking her hostage, he hides Serraoicco in an abandoned factory. But, while he knows he should eliminate all witnesses, he cannot bring himself to execute her. With its Steadicam slickness and Hitchcockian twists, this an impressive debut that contains echoes of William Wyler's The Collector (1965) and Terence Young's Wait Until Dark (1967). And one of Italy's foremost film-makers discusses his influences in Walter Fasano and Luca Guadagnino's Bertolucci on Bertolucci. In particular, he extols the virtues of Cahiers du Cinéma for making him reappraise Roberto Rossellini and he waxes lyrical about Jean-Luc Godard and Pier Paolo Pasolini, who had a profound impact on early works like Before the Revolution (1964), The Conformist and The Spider's Stratagem (both 1970). He also discusses his poet father Attilo and his working relationship with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider on Last Tango in Paris (1972). But, as Guadagnino and Fasano have limited themselves to existing interviews, they are somewhat constrained by the curiosity and ingenuity of past inquisitors. Nevertheless, they produce an intimate and intriguing portrait of a director who has never been afraid to undertake epic assignments like 1900 (1976) and The Last Emperor (1987), as well as more personal items like La Luna (1979) and The Dreamers (2003).

Bertolucci would doubtless sympathise with the aspiring auteur in Jonás Trueba's The Wishful Thinkers, as Francesco Carril mooches around Madrid discussing movies and the tightening grip of the recession with friends, colleagues and lovers as he waits for the funding that will enable him to start work on his next project. Shot in enveloping monochrome by Santiago Racaj and astute enough to include a romantic subplot involving Aura Garrido, this is the kind of film that will delight admirers of François Truffaut and Quentin Tarantino, as it is stuffed with references to old films and the history of a medium whose past technologies are revered as much as its great artists. The works of Catalan maverick Albert Serra also tend to appeal to cinéastes and Story of My Death is perhaps his most challenging uncompromising picture to date. Edited down from 400 hours of footage that was exquisitely inspired by the art of the period between the twilight of the Enlightenment and the birth of Romanticism, the action opens in Switzerland, as Casanova (Vicenç Altaió) eats prodigiously while sharing his views on philosophy, literature and women with poet Mike Landscape and his manservant Lluís Serrat. However, he soon finds himself in the Southern Carpathians, where he avails himself of the hospitality of sisters Clara Visa, Noelia Rodenas and Montse Triola and, through them, comes into conflict with Count Dracula (Eliseu Huertas). Sensual and obscure in equal measure, this is often a demanding and sometime pretentious puzzle. But cinematographer Jimmy Gimferrer's use of natural, candle and fire light is exceptional and the cast sustains the charade with admirable gravitas.

The horror is more visceral than cerebral in Eugenio Mira's Grand Piano, as Elijah Wood makes a return to the concert stage five years after the error-strewn performance that tarnished his reputation. Yet, while wife Kerry Bishé is excited as the prospect of Wood's comeback, she doesn't know that both she and her husband will be killed by fanatical music lover John Cusack if he gives anything less than a note perfect performance. Rammed with mischievous homages to Hitchcock, De Palma and Argento, this contrasts sharply with the more restrained terrors presented by Jordi Cadena in The Fear, an adaptation of Lolita Bosch's novel, M, which slowly reveals why 15 year-old Igor Szpakowski, mother Roser Camí and younger sister Alícia Falcó dread father Ramon Madaula coming home. Szpakowski tries to protect Cami and Falcó and hopes when Madaula leave that he can piece his life back together with his first girlfriend. But his father returns unexpectedly and the cycle of violent abuse looks likely to start all over again.

Renowned editor Fernando Franco covers similar territory in making the transition to directing with Wounded, which sees caring 26 year-old ambulance driver Marian Álvarez become violent when transformed by hyperventilating mood swings. Colleague Manolo Solo has noticed nothing in the four years they have worked together. But mother Rosana Pastor no longer knows how to communicate with Álvarez and prefers messaging a man with whom she appears to have a self-destructive relationship, while Andrés Gertrudix boyfriend Andrés Gertrudix is rapidly growing tired of the obsessive, booze and cocaine-fuelled phone calls that are making his life a misery. As her existence becomes mired in fibs, false memories and failed friendships, Álvarez seeks help before attending her father's second wedding. But, even then, there is no guarantee she will be able to find lasting relief from what is evidently Borderline Personality Disorder.

A clutch of European titles are included in this year's Experimenta slot, with Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi's Pays Barbare, Andrea Luka Zimmerman's Taskafa, Stories of the Street and Ben Rivers and Ben Russell's A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness showing alongside Filipino Gym Lumbera's Anak Araw and Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran's From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf.. There are also several continental classics in the Treasures from the Archive selection, with Leo Mittler's Harbour Drift (1929), Paul Martin's Glückskinder (1936), Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête (1946), Arne Skouen's Nine Lives (1957), Luchino Visconti's Sandra (1965) and Jacques Demy's Model Shop (1969) being joined by the world cinema duo Uday Shankar's Kalpana (1948) and Lino Brocka's Manila in the Claws of Light (1975), as well as the British contingent of Captain JBL Noel's The Epic of Everest (1924), Thorold Dickinson's Gaslight (1940), Basil Dearden's Victim (1961), Cyril Frankel's The Witches (1966) and Peter Brooks's Tell Me Lies (1968) and the American septet of Archie Mayo's The Doorway to Hell (1930), Lloyd Bacon's Picture Snatcher (1933), Arthur Ripley's The Chase (1946), Orson Welles's The Lady From Shanghai (1947), Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men (1952), Delmer Daves's Cowboy (1958) and Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason (1964).