Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 25/4/2019)

It's 2001 and Qiao (Zhao Tao) lives in Datong with jianghu gangster, Bin (Liao Fan). He plays mahjong in the back room of the club he runs in the rundown mining town and settles disputes between his hot-headed henchmen with cool assurance before toasting their enduring allegiance with a cocktail made by pouring bottles of hooch into a bowl. Qiao is very much one of the boys and punches people in the back as a form of friendly greeting. But she takes no nonsense, as she proves when she pays a visit to her father in the village of Shanxi and pulls the plug on the speech he is making to denounce the managers who have allowed his coal mine to close. 

She is also less than impressed when a gun drops out of Bin's belt while he is dancing to The Village People's `YMCA', as it makes him look weak. However, he saves face when powerful entrepreneur-cum-loan shark Brother Eryong comes to the club and asks Bin to deal with the rival who has been claiming that a villa development he owns is haunted. But news comes the next day that Eryong has been stabbed by a gang of youths and Detective Wang asks Bin if he knows if the victim had any enemies. They conclude that the kids were merely flexing their muscles and curse them for not adhering to the jianghu code. Qiao tries to console Eryong's widow and his ballroom dancing protégé, Miss Ma, performs as a sign of respect. 

While wandering through the backstreets of Eryong's village, Bin is whacked across the shins with an iron bar and two young brothers are quickly captured and brought before him. They insist they attacked the wrong person and Bin lets them off with a warning. Hobbling on crutches, he takes Qiao to see a volcano in the nearby countryside and she claims that the ash produced in such fierce temperatures has an unrivalled purity. Bin teaches Qiao to fire his gun and tells her that she is now part of the jianghu brotherhood. But she jokes that he has been watching too many Hong Kong crime movies and warns him that the days of the traditional mobster are waning. She even suggests moving away and starting a family somewhere else, but Bin has faith that Datong will be restored to its former glory.

Bin and Qiao call on Lin Jiadong (Diao Yinan), who has just come out of prison and his sister, Jiayan (Casper Liang), presents them with a box of expensive cigars. While returning home, however, the couple are hijacked by a motorcycle gang in the centre of town. Having watched his chauffeur get beaten with crash helmets, Bin leaps out of the car to stand his corner. But he is overpowered and the youths only back off when Qiao fires her lover's gun into the air. The gesture has the desired effect, but Qiao is arrested and jailed for possessing an illegal firearm, which she insists belongs to her rather than Bin. When her old friend Qing comes to see her, Qiao asks her to keep an eye on her ailing father and admits that Bin has abandoned her and she catches a glimpse of the club where they had held court while being transferred by coach to a prison outside the district. 

Five years pass before Qiao is released and she takes a cruise along the Yangtze River to see some of the settlements that have been earmarked for submersion as part of the Three Gorges dam project. While on the boat, a woman (Ding Jiali) steals her money and ID card while she is calling Lin to ask if he has seen Bin. She comes to Lin's office in Fengjie and is dismayed to learn that Bin has ditched her for Jiayan, who coldly informs Qiao that he wants nothing more to do with her. But she calmly avers that she will refuse to consider the relationship over unless Bin has the courage to say so to her face. 

Relying on her wits, Qiao gatecrashes a wedding in order to get some food and berates the woman from the boat after spotting her being assaulted in the market place. She also tries to scam a couple of wealth men in a restaurant (Zhang Yibai and Zhang Yi) by pretending to be the sister of their pregnant mistress. The first dismisses her with a sneer, but the second falls for her miscarriage story and gives her a bundle of banknotes to buy some vitamins. On a roll, Qiao uses the cash to hire a motorbike taxi to take her to the power plant where Bin is supposed to be working. When the driver tries to force his attentions on her, Qiao steals the bike and accuses him of rape so that the police will call Bin to verify her identity. 

Annoyed at being forced to meet up with her, Bin remains quiet as they walk along a jetty at the waterfront. Qiao suggests they get a room so they can talk and she admits to having been hurt when he failed to meet her out of prison after she had sacrificed her liberty for him. He concedes that he let her down, but protests that he is no longer a jianghu guy and left Datong after his erstwhile brothers disowned him because he was poor. However, when he tries to thank her by clasping the hand he claimed had saved his life, she points out that she is right- not left-handed and he sighs. She brings the conversation around to their relationship and mentions Jiayan, but Bin resists formally ending things and suggests that they jump over a flame to ward off the evil spirits that have been dogging them. He sets light to some paper and places it in the bed pan, but Qiao walks around the fire and goes out into the breaking storm without another word.

Having attended a concert by the band whose singer had given her a flower in the street, Qiao takes the train to Shanxi and finds herself sitting opposite a garrulous fellow from Karamy (Xu Zheng). He claims to be heading to Xinjiang to set up a UFO-spotting service for tourists and invites Qiao to come with him when she reveals that she once saw something in the sky. They change trains together and hold hands via a water bottle, as they meander along the platform. As darkness falls, the stranger hugs Qiao because she feels like a prisoner of the universe and she shrugs when he confesses to running a convenience store not an adventure firm. When the man dozes off, Qiao disembarks at a remote station and promptly sees an alien craft zoom through the darkness. 

Years pass and Qiao returns to Datong to take a job at the club Bin once owned. One day, out of the blue, she gets a phone call from him and discovers he is confined to a wheelchair. She takes him back to the mahjong parlour and former underling Li Xuan (Li Xuan) is pleased to see him. But the staff have no idea who Bin is and treat him with such disrespect that he loses him temper and Qiao threatens to throw him out unless he calms down. He fumes that he was paralysed after suffering an alcohol-induced stroke and scoffs when she asks why his wife and children deserted him. She claims to want to see him pay for betraying her, but he knows she still has feelings for him and is ready to exploit her pity.

Qiao is pleased by the reception Bin gets from some of the old gang when she wheels him back into the main parlour. However, Jia has not forgotten a past slight and suggests a wager with Bin's wheelchair as the prize. He wins and Bin is humbled in front of his friends. When Qiao takes him out for air, he asks why she took him back when she no longer has feelings for him and she taunts him about still being bound to the jianghu principles that he had abandoned. 

Indeed, she even finds a doctor who is willing to treat him and Bin recovers sufficiently to walk towards her when she wheels him out to the volcano. Shortly afterwards, however, he shuffles out of the club on New Year's Day and sends Qiao a phone message to let her know he's left. Stunned by his treachery and her own folly at believing Bin could change, Qiao props herself against the wall beneath a surveillance camera, whose image is too indistinct to allow us to see her expression. 

This closing sequence appears to be the most cunning of the swipes that this compelling saga takes at post-millennial China, as the decision by General Secretary Xi Jinping to give the propaganda ministry the final say in all matters cinematic means that directors like Jia Zheng-ke will be placed under much closer scrutiny. One hopes that he continues to demonstrate such ingenuity in his future state of the nation bulletins, as he is too valuable a commentator to allow himself to be silenced - although he did have to acquiesce in the domestic removal of ace director Feng Xiaogang's cameo as the doctor after he became caught up in the Fan Bingbing tax scandal.

Among the recurring pleasures of Jia's cinema is the presence of his wife and muse, Zhao Tao, who gives the best performance of her career in their seventh collaboration. Combining impassivity with complexity, Zhao excels as the moll who turns out to have a better understanding of the jianghu ethos than her perpetually inconstant lover. However, Liao Fan is every bit as impressive as he was in Diao Yinan's Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014), with which this film shares much in terms of its tone, pacing and social critique, as Jia notes that humans remain pretty much the same, even though trains get faster and phones get smarter. 

He and French cinematographer Eric Gautier also incorporate changes in camera technology into the picture. The opening shots were filmed by Jia in 2001 and show ordinary people travelling on a bus. They set the mood for the action to follow, but also enable Jia and Gautier to switch from an Academy Ratio digital video format through Digibeta to HD formats that give the imagery a textural fluidity that matches the ebb and flow of a narrative that takes its cue from Anton Chekhov and Jean-Luc Godard's musings about the dramatic potency of guns. Gautier also has a keen outsider's eye for landscape and architecture, which is reinforced by Liu Weixin's production design in the same way that Nikolas Javelle and Gwennolé Le Borgne's sound mix is complemented by the Lim Giong soundtrack that is enhanced by the telling inclusion of Sally Yeh's theme song from John Woo's heroic bloodshed classic, The Killer (1989), one of the Hong Kong triad movies that has helped corrupt Bin's sense of jianghu.

As versatile as he is prolific, Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa is rapidly becoming one of Europe's most essential voices. In addition to the fictional features My Joy (2010), In the Fog (2012) and A Gentle Creature (2017), he has also produced award-winning observational documentaries like Maidan (2014) and Victory Day (2018) and such acute archival actualities as The Event (2015), Austerlitz (2016) and The Trial (2018). Now, he turns his attention to the Donetsk People's Republic in Donbass, a 13-segment study of a nation in crisis that reflects Loznitsa's anger and impotence at the ongoing chaos in the eastern region of his homeland. 

At some point in 2014, a number of ordinary residents of a town in the so-called `Occupied Territory' are ushered out of a make-up trailer and made to wait in an alleyway. Several explosions are heard nearby, but these people are not in a live combat zone. Instead, they are eyewitnesses for hire contributing to a fake TV news report about an attack on a bus and they give their testimony and denounce the `fascist' regime in Kiev with a polished sense of petrified outrage. 

The scene shifts to a provincial town hall somewhere in Ukraine, as a woman (Olesya Zhurakovskaya) who has been accused of taking bribes by the local paper interrupts a meeting to pour a bucket of effluence over the mayor (Grigori Masliuk) and argue on camera with the wife of the newspaper owner (Liudmilla Smorodina) about the legitimacy of her tactics in the face of legal and bureaucratic indifference. Meanwhile, in a maternity hospital in Eastern Ukraine, Boris Mikhailovitch (Boris Kamorzin) shows the patients and staff members the foodstuffs and medicines that have been squirrelled away in his office by a corrupt doctor (Evgeni Chepurnyak). Posing as a man of the people, Boris promises to distribute the goods as soon as he has completed an inventory. But he is in cahoots with the physician and flirts with a buxom nurse after concluding their illicit deal. 

At a remote Ukrainian checkpoint, Boris is stopped by a soldier who thinks he recognises him. An underling suggests he's an MP, but the computer is broken when they radio in for a background search and Boris and his cohort are allowed to proceed. They are passed by a bus going in the opposite direction and, to the accompanying sound of a boy playing a handheld video game, two women discuss the prospect of finding their homes in one piece after being driven out by enemy shelling. When the driver is flagged over, a soldier comes aboard and makes a cursory search for weapons. He is more interested in finding some lard to cook with and an elderly woman gives him half of her own supply.

Once over the frontier into the Occupied Territory, the vehicle is pulled over at a separatist outpost and the menfolk are forced to get out, strip to the waist and listen to a rant about their cowardice for not having volunteered for the cause. The interrogation is temporarily interrupted when a Cossack guard announces he has caught a fascist. In fact, German journalist (Thorsten Merten) is simply covering the conflict and he has to do some fast talking in broken Russian to establish his innocence. As he is released with a caution, however, the guard curses that his grandfather probably supported Hitler. 

Somewhere close by near the frontline, a soldier finds a jar of pickles in a storeroom and brings them out to share with the comrades sitting on a tank in the snow. The German journalist arrives with his photographer-cum-translator (Olexandr Techynskyi) and notice that three troops refuse to be snapped and have difficulty naming the nearby village. When the reporter asks if he can speak to the commander, the men launch into an anti-Spartacus routine, as they each deny having any authority. Even a man who clearly resembles an officer passes the buck to a bearded fellow (Sergei Russkin) who declares that his army is intent on removing fascists from Western Ukraine in the same way that his ancestors had purged Nazi Germany. As he finishes his speech, a missile lands behind them and the screen goes black. 

Peering through the darkness, a man opens the door of a city bomb shelter in the Occupied Territory. He guides an unseen figure through the cramped quarters, where people are huddled together in the cold and damp. A small boy takes over to point out the sick and the scared before we see the visitor (Irina Plesnyayeva) being reunited with her mother (Nina Antonova). The fake news report is playing on the television, as the well-dressed blonde empties a shopping bag of essentials and goodies (including caviar) and pleads with her mother to leave the shelter and live in comfort with her. She assures her that the neighbourhood is safe and urges her to leave the `scum' she is slumming it with. However, the old lady locks herself into an end room and refuses to budge, as her daughter hammers at the door and becomes increasingly hysterical.

Stalking out to her waiting husband in a four-wheel drive, the blonde snaps when he suggests that some of his boys could forcibly remove her mother. Having been delayed at a level crossing, she is still in a foul mood when she returns to the regional government building where she works in the Occupied Territory. Her boss (Vadim Dubovsky) is meeting with a woman (Zhanna Lubgane) who is trying to persuade him to lay on special arrangements for a touring exhibition of relics belonging to martyr Theodosius of Kherson and St Curila Plenkovic, that she is organising to highlight the link between holiness and heroism and draw attention to the plight of Novorossiya (which was the name given to the southern tracts of the old Russian Empire). 

Fobbing them off with vague approval for their initiative, the boss ushers them out and looks out of his window to see a platoon leader punishing one of his men for looting. He is beaten with sticks by his comrades, although they vote to let another prisoner off with a warning, as it was his first offence. Meanwhile, at police headquarters elsewhere in the Occupied Zone, Simeon (Alexander Zamurayev) tries to reclaim a requisitioned car from Batanya (Georgii Deliev). The bearded man sits behind a desk strewn with mobile phones and tablets and he pauses to check the ones that ring while exhorting Simeon to sign a piece of paper entrusting his vehicle to the cause. When he hesitates, Batanya demands to see his documents and threatens to detain him so that he cannot collect his daughter from kindergarten. His tone becomes more menacing when he asks whether Simeon backs the fascists, but he realises he has no choice in the matter when Batanya is informed that Simeon has wealthy friends and orders him to make a sizeable donation to the separatist coffers, as well as signing over his Jeep.

As Simeon is escorted into a room full of other businessmen pleading with their associates to wire them funds so they can leave, a duty officer is called away to an emergency. A prisoner (Valeri Antoniuk) with a Ukrainian flag around his neck has been tied to a post on the street with a sign on his chest denouncing him as an extermination squad volunteer. He is there so that people can look the enemy in the eye. But a passing carload of slackers insist on posing for selfies with him and even rope in some passing girls to join them. A crowd begins to gather and a middle-aged woman asks the captive to reveal the identity of his masters and how much he has been paid to lay mines to kill small children. He swears that he was only in the catering corps, but no one believes him and punches start to rain in on him. The soldiers make a half-hearted attempt to protect him and have to lead him away when the mob turns nasty and calls for the detainee to be executed. 

In a small town in the Occupied Territory, a wedding party arrives at the registry office. Gunshots are fired as the bride emerges from a stretch limo and registrar (Natalya Buzko) quickly realises that Ivan (Evgeni Chistyakov) and Angela (Svetlana Kolesova) are as rowdy as their guests, as they mug their way through the ceremony and draw raucous cheers from their friends when they kiss. As several of those in attendance had been baiting the Ukrainian captive, they scarcely need a patriotic anthem to whip them into a frenzy. But the registrar achieves a sufficient level of silence to announce that the couple have adopted the surname of Fried-Egg. 

A couple of tongue-tied soldiers make a speech and a female member of parliament reads a poem before the guests storm the stage for selfies. The troops file out of the building and drive off in Simeon's commandeered car. Meanwhile, another vehicle approaches a Ukrainian checkpoint as a bus bomb goes off in the queue. As others U-turn and speed away, the unseen female driver gets out to survey the damage and sees bodies on the tarmac (in contrast to the stage-managed scene witnessed earlier). Nearby, a pair of rocket launcher trucks hit the road and a following car is ambushed by soldiers in Simeon's vehicle. 

Coming full circle, we return to the make-up trailer, as the woman who was interviewed in the first sequence (Tamara Yatsenko) tells her colleagues to cheer up. However, a soldier enters and guns them all down before beating a hasty retreat before the police and an ambulance arrive to establish a crime scene. The camera looks on from a discrete distance, as witnesses prepare to give their statements to a TV crew and we hear the director asking one woman to repeat her lines so they can get a wide shot. She delivers her spiel verbatim before likening the victims to angels, as they had been part of a film unit that hadn't been done any harm to anyone.  

The irony of the latter testimony will not be lost on the audience, as it watches the fabrications being meticulously woven around the truth. But, while this sprawling snapshot of a writhing nation seethes with serious intent, Loznitsa prefers to use satire to expose the mania and the manipulation, the intimidation and the injustice, the fear and the farce. Few will have any doubts about where his sympathies lie, but there is no whitewashing or airbrushing here. The whole sorry mess is laid out for our edification and it's impossible not to be saddened and shocked by what has come to pass for everyday life. 

Exceptionally photographed with by Romanian Oleg Mutu with a recklessly restless camera that refuses to stick to the script, the tonally diverse vignettes etch the caricatures with a scalpel-like precision that says as much for the skill of the cast as for Loznitsa's writing and direction. As is to be expected, this is a scattershot enterprise with sequences like the German reporter's terrifying encounter with the snarling Cossacks, the grimly matter-of-fact tour of the bomb shelter and the sinisterly civilised misappropriation of a smug bourgeois's car being stronger than others. But the clear standouts are the hideous humiliation of the captured foe and the speed with which the good-natured baiting turns into murderous mayhem and the darkly comic wedding ceremony that sees Natalya Buzko shoot so many disapproving looks at the dome-headed Evgeni Chistyakov and the blowsy Svetlana Kolesova that she almost seems to be taking her life into her own hands each time she strives to regain control of a situation that excruciatingly reflects the wider breakdown of an entire social order.

It can't be easy following in the footsteps of a famous father, especially when he has a track record like Constantin Costa-Gavras. The Greek-born, French-based director (who turned 86 in February) became a master of the politically charged thriller and earned a Best Director nomination for Z (1969), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, as well as a Best Director prize at Cannes for Special Section (1975) and the Palme d'or for Missing, which tied with Serif Gören's Yilmaz Güney-scripted drama, Yol, in 1982. But Romain Gavras made a steady start with the offbeat Franco-Irish road movie, Our Day Will Come (2010), and he returns from a stint shooting videos and commercials with The World Is Yours, which puts a Tarantinoesque spin on Georges Lautner's classic crime caper, Les Tontons flingueurs (1963).

Forever being nagged by mother Danny (Isabelle Adjani) to find a nice girl and settle down, Parisian twentysomething François Farès (Karim Leklou) is determined to get out of his banlieue tenement and make something of himself. Currently, he deals drugs for Putin (Sofian Khammes), a neighbourhood crook who breaks into the pound to rescue his demanding dog, Ibra. But Farès and his sleazy lawyer, Vincent (Philippe Katerine), have lined up a deal to import Mister Freeze ice pops into the Maghreb and he needs the €80,000 his mother has been keeping in trust. 

Unfortunately, as he discovers during one of Danny's periodic shoplifting raids at the Galeries Lafayette, she has lost the money playing poker and a pistachio eclair at a posh hotel (cue a cameo by American director John Landis) scarcely compensates for his loss. So, when Putin asks him to go to Benidorm to make contact with a Scottish supplier named Bruce (Sam Spruell), Farès agrees to make the run with his loyal, but dim sidekick, Henri (Vincent Cassel), and a pair of stoner goons supplied by Putin, Mohamed 1 (Mounir Amamra) and Mohamed 2 (Mahamadou Sangaré). 

There's a snag, however, as Putin demands €10,000 to customise the car they will use to smuggle the consignment. When Danny fails to come up with a loan after Farès goes to see her at the café where she hangs out with his numerous godmothers (who make him perform a pot belly dance), he talks Henri into posing as fake cops so that they can raid Danny's poker game and steal the seed money. Naturally, she is furious with Farès for making her look bad in front of her friends. But regular accomplice Lamya (Oulaya Amamra) is amused by his effrontery and agrees to join the expedition as the designated girl to ease their passage through customs. 

While the Mohameds teach Henri about climate change beside the hotel pool, Farès allows his crush on Lamya to get the better of him and they tumble into bed together. However, she is hurt that he agrees to her insistence on paying €500 for sex and tries to bolt. But she is quickly caught and brought back to the room before Bruce arrives with his young daughter, Brittany (Gabby Rose), and henchman Glasgow Ranger (Michael John Treanor). He convinces Farès to let him take the money and return in an hour with the keys to the loaded car. When the deadline passes, the Mohameds accuse Farès of being a fool and go in search of the Scotsman to reclaim the cash. 

Rejecting Henri's offer to execute the Mohameds, Farès goes looking for Bruce with Lamya and they find him in a karaoke bar. He explains to Farès that he refuses to deal with Putin because he's young and unknown and has no intention of risking being linked into a narco-terrorist operation in which drug money is used to finance fundamentalist activity. Having entered the bar alone, Lamya seduces the Scotsman with her rendition of Toto's `Africa' and is slipping away to Bruce's hotel room when Farès tries to carjack them at gunpoint. Despite sympathising with his plight, the supplier suggests that Farès goes home before he gets too far out of his depth and Lamya avoids eye contact as her friend is beaten to a pulp by Ranger and his bully boys. 

Out of options, Farès calls Danny, who flies to Spain to break into the safe in Bruce's room. She is far from impressed with her son's performance and strides through the hotel lobby with the confidence of an old hand. However, the safe proves to be empty and Danny has to kidnap Brittany who was listening to music in her room. Farès is appalled and accepts Henri's suggestion to lay low with his old mucker, René (François Damiens), who has bought himself a swanky villa with the proceeds of a people smuggling racket. While he flirts with Danny, Farès bonds with Brittany while comparing notes on exploitative parental neglect and she shows him how to access the account on her phone that Bruce has set up to conduct his drug drops.

Farès tracks down the Mohameds (who have been driving around town bashing Brits) and fills them in about a planned raid on a delivery arriving the next night by boat. He also brings Danny, Henri and René up to speed and Lamya decamps from Bruce's hideout to join them at the villa to make their final preparations. With Brittany happy to help Farès, he leaves Henri to take a speedboat full of migrants to raid the freighter, while Danny (in a burqini) makes contact with the Scot at a water park. Promising Lamya that he will take care of her, Farès returns Brittany to her father just as Vincent makes a phone call in a Spanish accent alerting police to a non-existent bomb in the girl's knapsack. 

As the cops swarm over Bruce's gang and he curses his daughter for betraying him, Henri is driven by his half-digested knowledge about the Illuminati to torch the bulk of the stash before making a getaway with the Mohameds. However, Farès allows Danny to be arrested at the perimeter fence of the water park because he has had enough of her ruining his life. He also permits the Mohameds to steal the drugs from under Henri's nose. But he and Vincent have arranged for his blonde-dyed Congolese client, Dembèle (Boris Gamthety), to ambush them as they hand them over to Putin. While he is gunned down, the Mohameds are integrated into Dembèle's gang and we see Danny having a ball behind bars and Henri chilling out in his very own camper van before the final shot shows Farès have a momentary crisis of conscience before submerging in the swimming pool at the luxury North African villa he now shares with Lamya. 

Tying up the loose ends with a neatness that epitomises this slick, if occasionally boorish flick, Gavras and co-writers Karim Boukercha and Noé Debré (who has collaborated in the past with Jacques Audiard and Michaël R. Roskam) toss in a teasing sense of ambiguity that edges this a notch above the genre norm. The debts to Brian De Palma, Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie seem obvious, while it's tempting to suggest that Karim Leklou spent some time studying the screen mannerisms of iconic crime actor Lino Ventura. But the action most bears similarities to Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah's Gangsta (2018), which also alluded to issues of race and class while keeping the focus firmly fixed on the intricacy of the scams. 

Ably served by cinematographer André Chemetoff and editor Benjamin Weill, Gavras demonstrates the visual flair that has become his trademark without being flashy. He also relishes quieter sequences, such as the choice exchange between Leklou and Gabby Rose on nightmare parenting, while Vincent Cassel's ongoing struggle to understand the conspiracy theory clips he keeps watching on his phone is also drolly handled. As the emasculating matriarch from hell, Isabelle Adjani fully exploits her Algerian roots to play up the exotic Ab-Fabbish eccentricity of a character who could easily prosper in a spin-off picture of her own. Less is demanded from Oulaya Amamra, however, who suffers from the chauvinist skein that coils itself around the often cartoonish proceedings in a much more distasteful manner than the self-consciously provocative debunking of racial stereotyping in French cinema.

A quarter of a century has passed since Richard Cameron's play about some kids in a South Yorkshire mining village was performed above a London pub. He was invited to write a screenplay, but the manuscript has remained on a shelf for so long that any of the child actors who might have been considered for roles would now be more suitable candidates to play the parents. However, theatre director Bill Buckhurst has dusted down Pond Life for his cinematic debut and few will disagree that the wait has been worthwhile. 

In a housing estate on the edge of a former pit town during the hot summer of 1994, twentysomething Trevor (Tom Varey) has set his heart on catching the giant carp that lives in the village pond. Numerous other anglers have also got `Nessie' in their sights and Billy 'Big Daddy' Gomersal (Adrian Hood) is aghast when he nips into the woods to relieve himself and buddy Kenny 'Little Guy' Yates (Steve Garti) allows his fishing rod to be tugged into the water and float away. Witnessing the furore is Cassie (Daisy Edgar-Jones), whose tryst in a nearby field with Maurice (Abraham Lewis) was being watched by Shane (Gianluca Gallucci) before his presence was detected and he got a chasing along the bank. Once the fuss dies down, however, and his neighbours are tackling a quiz at the welfare club, Trevor returns to his spot for a nocturnal tilt. 

While Malcolm (Angus Imrie) plays video arcade games while singing Wet Wet Wet's version of `Love Is All Around', his beloved Cassie watches a video of John Landis's An American Werewolf in London (1981) with her younger brother, Dave (Ethan Wilkie). Neither takes much notice of the sight of Tony Blair waving to applauding Labour Party members on the TV news and Pogo (Esmé Creed-Miles) seems equally oblivious to the world around her, as she reads in bed by torchlight and quietly hums on her kazoo. She has spent her day wandering around the estate with her eyes covered with red cellophane, while she records the chatter of the people she passes on her route.

Next morning, Pogo plays the tape to her mother, Rachel (Sian Brooke), who is highly protective of her daughter, who appears to have emotional and educational issues. However, Pogo seems content to kazoo `Happy Talk' from South Pacific while sitting on the pavement watching the passing scene and waiting for Shane to steal her some chocolate from the newsagent's where he works as a paperboy. She sees Trevor whizz past on his moped to crash out on the sofa, while stepmother Irene (Sally Lindsay) chide Dave and Cassie for various breakfast time misdemeanours. The latter is locked in the bathroom inspecting a felt-tip bicep tattoo of Maurice's name, while he is being ticked off by mother Kath (Siobhan Finneran) for not writing to his older brother, Vic, who is in prison. 

Trevor promises dad Russ (Shaun Dooley) to make more of an effort to get on with the newcomers and laughs when asked if he's caught Moby Dick yet. He is well aware that Pogo has a crush on him and hangs around the shed, where he works on his fishing tackle. When she was in hospital, Trevor had made Pogo a mixtape and he continues to find songs for her to play on the cassette recorder she takes everywhere. She relishes a trip to the shop to buy bait much more than Malcolm does an errand his mother, Muriel (Julie Hesmondhalgh), for some more calamine lotion to treat the stings caused by Maurice throwing him in a clump of nettles. But Malcolm's not the only one looking shame-faced, as Shane has to apologise to Dave for biting him while playing make-believe games on the slag heaps on the outskirts of what was once a mining community. 

Pogo and Trevor are amused by the way Malcolm keeps making a fool of himself in front of Cassie, who drapes herself around Maurice while walking around the estate, as he has a fearsome reputation because of his brother's crimes. He steals her a necklace from a market stall, while his mother keeps having to duck disapproving neighbours and Malcolm has to hold his tongue in front of Pogo when asking Trevor about Vic, who was his best mate before he went inside. As Trevor strums a song on his guitar and leaves Pogo a message about having to move to town to get a job, she rifles through bin bags for items worth gleaning and gets teased by some younger kids for being a `monkey nut' when they see her pulling along a wooden nodding dog. 

Rachel gets tearful when she sees Pogo trying to feed a sausage to the toy dog and puts on a brave face when she heads off to mix special bait for Trevor. Suddenly overcome with emotion inside the shed, Pogo starts singing `Away in a Manger' and stuffs dog meat into her mouth to prevent her from adding swear words to the verse. Trevor consoles her and asks Dave and Shane to pack his fishing back while he takes Pogo home. Having just come from the playground where Malcolm had been picked on by some bullies, the tweenage duo barely notice Pogo's distress, especially as they are digesting the information that Trevor sometimes wears women's tights to keep his legs warm when he's fishing at night. 

Returning home to make sandwiches, Trevor is asked by Irene to tell Cassie to turn her radio down. She makes a fuss about being free to do what he likes and he reminds her that she has his old room and should show a little more respect. He also tells her to watch Maurice, as Vic is in prison for raping a girl in the woods and Cassie is stunned into silence. While Irene nags Russ about asking Trevor to move out, he leads his little band of acolytes to Decoy Ponds and a lonely lad on his bike wishes he could join them. Instead, he amuses himself by baiting Maurice and Cassie until the former threatens to thump him and he hurts himself by falling off his saddle. 

While Rachel accompanies the next-door neighbours to bingo night at the club, Trevor struggles to prevent Pogo, Dave and Shane making from driving the fish away by chanting the theme from Jaws (1975). When the latter pair are sent home to fetch a forgotten reel, Malcolm takes their place on the bank and comments on the cathedral-like silence before spotting a star reflecting in the placid surface of the water. He slightly spoils the mood by confessing to having slung a coal sack full of porn mags into the pond because his mother wouldn't let him put them out for the bin men. But he redeems himself by asking Trevor if things make more sense as you get older and ponders how adults navigate life if they keep wishing they were 16 again. 

Meanwhile, Dave and Shane get into a wrestling match on the way home and Dave discovers that his mate is wearing stockings and suspenders because his mum didn't have any tights. Initially, he roars with laughter, but curiosity gets the better of him and he asks how they feel and whether he had considered getting run over while wearing them. Arriving at the shed, they find Maurice and Cassie snogging on the floor and the former recognises Shane from the field the previous day. He threatens him and Dave and Cassie are uncomfortable with his tone and, when they are alone, she asks Maurice how much he knows about Vic assaulting Pogo.

She is involved in a fracas of her own, as Malcolm snags her line and they each think they have caught a monster fish before the truth emerges. While Trevor tries to untangle the lines, Shane goes home in tears and Dave tidies up the mess in the shed. Cassie dumps Maurice, while the oblivious adults dance to the house band singing `Love Is All Around'. Suddenly, Pogo gets a bite and knows instantly that she's hooked Nessie. Trevor helps her reel the carp in, while Malcolm waits with a net. They gaze on the 15lb creature with awe. But Pogo senses the fish wants to return to the water and Trevor lowers it back with a splash. Feeling exhilarated, Malcolm declares his love for Cassie at the top of his voice before proclaiming Pogo to be the Lady of the Lake. 

The next morning, Trevor leaves his copy of Bernard Venables's Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing and the cassette with his message for Pogo in the shed before slipping away before anyone notices. She cries when she listens to the tape, but Cassie reassures her that he will come back to see her. Worried that her mind will wiped when she finishes her treatment at the hospital, Pogo admits to getting confused about the love she feels from her mother, Trevor and Jesus. But Cassie promises things will sort themselves out before making a tearful exit, just as Malcolm arrives. He can scarcely contain himself when Pogo breaks the news about Maurice and, even though he admits his armpits could do with a bit of deodorant, he bustles out to ask Cassie for a date. 

Although the dialogue occasionally sounds handcrafted, such is the brilliance of the young cast that this charming evocation of an era that has become bygone in a trice reminds one of what social realism used to be before Ken Loach and Paul Laverty gave it a bit of Momentum. Of course it's rose-tinted, with the bitter realities of the Miners' Strike left in the margins so that Cameron and Buckhurst can concentrate on the juvenile perspective. But the pitching of the action midway between the departure of Margaret Thatcher and the arrival of Tony Blair gives the subtext a political sting that will not be lost on anyone who lived through a period of seismic change from which the country has yet to recover. If you want to know why Brexit is happening, look no further than this deceptively astute drama. 

Having already caught the eye in Clio Barnard's Dark River (2017), Esmé Creed-Miles (who has a look of mother Samantha Morton) gives another excellent account of herself, as the fragile victim of a cruel crime whose tics are just a tad overdone by a writer more accustomed to writing for the stage than the screen (despite the quality of his 1997 teleplay, Stone, Scissors, Paper). But Creed-Miles makes Pogo utterly believable, although it would have been nice to hear her mother call her by her real name to remind us she is somebody's daughter and not just a fictional contrivance. 

Tom Varey leads the rest of the ensemble with an easy affability that is reinforced by the Richard Hawley songs on the soundtrack. Credit here must go to Buckhurst, who creates a palpable sense of community through the interaction between the principals and secondary characters and through the deft manner in which Nick Cooke's camera picks up the revealing details in Anthony Lamble's thoughtful mise-en-scène. There are self-consciously cinematic interludes, with editor Christopher Watson being a bit too fond of a montage. But this is a poised and poignant picture that manages to be authentic and nostalgic without being overly polemical.

Thirty years ago, German twins Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short with Balance (1989). In the intervening period, they have produced animated sequences for a range of commercials and MTV ident slots. But they moved into features last year with Luis and the Aliens and clearly enjoyed the experience so much that they have quickly followed it up with Spy Cat, which draws on the Grimm fairytale of `The Bremen Town Musicians'. 

Nothing ever happens in Drabville in East Bumblesnore. Not that Marnie (Karoline Mask von Oppen) would ever know, as she is a ginger house cat belonging to Nurse Rosalinde (Marion Kahle), who never lets her precious pet venture outdoors. Instead, she spends her time watching cartoon crime shows on the television in her room and creeping around the house with her purple plastic periscope and Instamatic camera. When she discovers that Rosalinde's long-lost brother, Paul (Phil Lewis), has not broken both of his legs, as he claims, Marnie suspects he is the thief breaking into all the houses around the village. But he convinces her that he's a special agent on the tail of the villains and persuades her to let him box her up for an undercover mission. 

Luckily, the chickens chasing Eggbert (Tony Clark) the uncrowing rooster to keep themselves out of the farmer's cooking pot cause the van carrying Marnie to swerve and the box lands in the middle of the same country road that Elvis the dog (Tom Zahner) is driving along in the tractor he has stolen from the owner who is trying to shoot him for being such a useless guard dog and allowing the crooks to burgle the farmhouse. Reluctantly agreeing to give Marnie and Eggbert a lift, Elvis pretends to be gruff and tough and refuses to stop to collect Mambo (Phil Lewis), a performing zebra who is trying to catch up with the circus. 

When the tractor grinds to a halt, Elvis steals a red van that just happens to belong to Paul's hapless sidekicks and they find the loot in the back. However, the cops think the animals are responsible for the robberies and the van gets knocked up in the air by a speeding train during a desperate car chase. They all survive with a few bumps and bruises, but a downpour washes off Mambo's black-and-white paint to reveal a starstruck donkey named Anton underneath. Marnie ticks him off for fibbing to them after giving them a lecture about honesty and trust among friends. But they agree to work together when they realise that Paul has been stealing valuables to disguise the fact he is really only after the Naive Art masterpieces of farmer painter Ottmar Hering and that Eggbert's house is the final target. 

While they get photographic evidence of Paul's guilt, he takes Eggbert hostage and Marnie winds up in the animal shelter after Elvis decides they're wasting their time. However, when Rosalinde finds Eggbert in the chest freezer in the basement, he stumbles upon Paul's stash and they call the cops to arrest him. But he makes a getaway in his flying wheelchair and the gang has to steal a plane to rescue Rosalinde who is hanging on to the chair's wheels. After a harum scarum mid-air showdown, Paul winds up behind bars, Rosalinde plays house with the postman and the chickens are delighted to meet their new Latin lover. As for Marnie and her pals, they zoom off in a customised motorbike and sidecar in search of new cases to solve. 

European CGI doesn't have a great reputation with those reared on Disney, DreamWorks and Pixar. But the Lauensteins know their stuff and the settings for this enjoyable romp owe much to the Barbizon School of rustic realism. There's something pleasingly familiar about the protagonists, too, with Marnie being Garfield without the stripes, Elvis resembling Griswald from Top Cat, Anton being a dead ringer for Donkey from the Shrek movies, and Eggbert bringing to mind Rocky from Peter Lord and Nick Park's Chicken Run (2000). 

Of course, this leaves the picture open to accusations of being visually derivative. But the story reworks the Grimm template to amusing effect, while the characterisation and voice work are strong enough to coax grown-ups into rooting for the animals, along with the tinies. Moreover, there are several throwaway Hitchcock gags on offer, with the feline heroine being named after Tippi Hedren's character in Marnie (1959), while there's also a splendid pastiche of the crop duster sequence from North By Northwest (1959). The Lauensteins have certainly set themselves up for a sequel, so paws crossed we get one.

Moving on to the week's Dochouse offerings, we come to the debuting Marco Proserpio's The Man Who Stole Banksy, which starts out by outlining the mechanics of the theft of an infamous piece of street art before branching out to consider such weighty topics as the occupation of Palestine, cultural colonisation, the privatisation of space and the commodification of graffiti. It's an ambitious attempt to examine the ethics of political control and artistic exploitation. But, despite the presence of Iggy Pop as narrator, this is also a self-satisfied exercise that skips across surfaces rather than exploring burning issues in commensurate depth. Moreover, it pays far too much lip service to its art world contributors by cluttering proceedings with a glut of archly composed close-ups designed to break the static talking head mould. 

The story starts in 2007 when artworks by the anonymous British street artist Banksy began appearing across the Palestinian town of Bethlehem. As he says in an audio message, the purpose of daubing the Wall with images and slogans was to draw the world's media to a forgotten crisis point and force them to report on the apartheid nature of the barrier restricting movement between Israel and the Occupied Territories. A number of participating artists explain their motives for joining this `John and Yoko' stunt, while a few locals describe the guerilla nature of the operation. Reference is also made to Santa's Ghetto, the gallery that was opened to raise money for Palestinian artists and became a honey pot for wheeler-dealers from around the world.

While reporting on the phenomenon, one crew interviewed Walid `The Beast' Zawahrah, a Bethlehem taxi driver who jokes that he wishes Banksy would give him money for a new car. By 2012, Walid had become internationally known, as he had decided to remove the image known as `The Donkey and the Soldier' because so many Palestinians had been insulted by the implication that they were stupid beasts. Rather than smash the picture, however, he cut through the concrete to preserve it and offer it for sale to the highest bidder in order to improve the lot of his neighbours. On camera, he is unrepentant and utterly unconcerned by Banksy's angry reaction to having his work denounced and appropriated. As far as he is concerned, the Briton is the one who has stepped out of line by thinking he can come to Bethlehem and impose his opinions on the residents. 

Yet, while the camera follows Walid to his gym so he can tell us about his powerlifting prowess, the focus soon shifts on to Maikel Canawati, the merchant who had hired Walid and his crew to remove the mural so that he could flog it on Ebay. However, he refuses to be interviewed and Iggy Pop has to explain that Banksy had not intended to cast aspersion about the Palestinian people, as he had been trying to update Horace Moore-Jones's `Simpson and His Donkey', which had been painted to highlight the plight of the ANZAC soldiers who had fought in the Dardanelles during the Great War. 

A clutch of Palestinian street artists concur that the telling phrase or image on a highly visible wall can have a devastating effect and they describe how the practice became more prevalent during the First Intifada. But, as French cultural commentator Françoise Vergès points out, Western artists display a degree of arrogance in descending on trouble spots to make statements on their own terms without bothering to research the sensitivities of the people who will have to look at the pieces on a daily basis. She also laments the fact that such grandstanding overshadows the work of artists on the ground and she suggests that this form of cultural imperialism avoids scrutiny because the international art market drowns out the protesting voices by presenting the Western interlopers as politically committed heroes raising awareness through their courage and talent. 

Brothers Bashar and Sami Zarour agree that it would have been more impactful if Banksy had painted on the Israeli side of the Wall, as Palestinians already know what's going on. They also question the ethics of art dealership, as they claim that a painting ceases to belong to an artist the moment they finish it and that the big bucks are made down the line by traders and collectors ramping up the price through auctions. Indeed, `The Donkey and the Soldier' was quickly shipped out of Jaffa to Copenhagen and Iggy Pop comments wrily on the shadiness of the transaction and the fact that a buyer probably decided he wanted to own the painting before anyone took offence about its symbolic meaning.

As Peter Hvidberg recalls seeing the Ebay listing and sending gallerist Monique Har-El to check it out, they claim to have been saving a masterpiece for posterity, as so much street art disappears or is destroyed. The pixellated buyer affirms that he is something of a saviour before legal experts Annabelle Gauberti and Alison Young consider the nature of street art copyright and the problems that taggers can face if they waive their anonymity to make a claim of authorship. They also examine what constitutes ownership of a piece of public art and when removal of an often illegal artefact becomes vandalism or theft. Cultural critic Carlo McCormick and Banksy's former manager Steve Lazarides are in no doubt that those who take possession or deface such works are depriving the artist of their freedom of speech and the public of the right to enjoy images created for their edification.

However, publicist Luke Trevaskis is in favour of salvaging artworks and we go to Liverpool to meet collector Tony Braxter as his crew removes an item from a wall in Roe Alley, which has the reputation of being one of the toughest in the city. But Lazarides counters claims that they are in the heritage business and accuses them of being thieves out to line their pockets. The scene shifts to New York, where collector Stephan Keszler, who began acquiring Banksys after exhibiting them in his gallery. But he admits to selling them for whopping sums because that's also part of his business and British collector Robin Burton suggests he is merely stepping in to protect pictures for which the local community refuse to take responsibility by stumping up the cash to safeguard them. 

Photographer Ray Mock wonders whether such people are little more than glorified souvenir hunters who rob an item of its integrity by removing it from its designated environment. Art historian Christian Omodeo disagrees, as he insists that an artwork continues to communicate after it has been removed from its original setting (as numerous classic altarpieces would suggest). In slamming the `context' theory, Keszler chimes in with an observation about Pablo Picasso giving a mistress a painting as a gift and it now being sold for millions. But Proserpio decides to return to Bethlehem to see how the loss of `The Donkey and the Soldier' has gone down with the people. 

Mayor Vera Baboun is disappointed that an insight into Palestinian suffering had gone and thanks Banksy for his efforts on the town's behalf. But Canawati continues to insist that he has no regrets about his actions, as he used the money to contribute towards the renovation of the Greek Orthodox church of St Nicholas where he worships. He also suggests that Bansky stops bellyaching and creates some more merchandise so they can help more good causes in a place he professes to care about. Priest Paulos Allam approves of his tactics, but Walid is less than amused because he never received a penny for his efforts. While he is cross with Canawati, he is even more incensed with Banksy and tells him to do something tangible for the people rather than making hollow statements that only enrich the haves who would never dream of recompensing the have nots. As if to prove his point, he goes to see `Rage, Flower Thrower' and picks away at the paint and says it will have peeled or faded in a couple of years and will be remembered only from pictures online or in books. 

After going on display in an upmarket London shopping mall, the rebranded `Donkey Documents' goes on sale at Julien's auction house in Los Angeles. However, it fails to reach the reserve price and is removed from public view, in much the same way that the early works of Keith Haring were hoovered up by Italian collector-cum-performance artist, Paolo Buggiani. He explains how he found and preserved some chalk on blackboard drawings from the New York Subway and the narration contents itself with politely raising questions of authenticity rather than making any more forthright accusation. 

An amusing digression takes us to Vienna, where collector Philipp Teuchtler shows off the street art he has acquired before taking the camera on a tour of his neighbourhood to show how derivative the form has become, as so many artists now produce pieces to order for wealthy clients. In order to consider whether collecting street art has street cred, Proserpio seeks out artists Lee Bofkin and Good Guy Boris, who agree they would cheerfully be exhibited in museums if people took the trouble to ask them. They don't, however, agree with the methods employed by Bologna restorer Camillo Tarozzi, who devised a way of peeling images by the likes of Blu off walls to show at the gallery curated by Luca Ciancabilla. 

Like Patrizio Roversi Monaco, he believes that artists lose their right to say what happens to a work once they affix it without permission to someone else's property. If they consider the pictures to be a form of premeditated damage, they are often grateful to Tarozzi and his team for removing them with care, while the gallery is delighted to give wall space to important works that can be enjoyed for decades to come. Indeed, Tarozzi defends his approach by averring that nothing gets sold for profit, as he is solely interested in preservation and exhibition. However, on the day the show opened, Blu erased every last work from walls across Bologna and denounced the members of `the Cosy Club' for pretending to be philanthropic art lovers when they are just trying to sell tickets. 

Contributor Christian Omodeo falls foul of Blu and his acolytes by championing the Banksy & Co. exhibit and he feels the need to defend his stance by referencing an Isaac Asimov story in which people lose the ability to remember because their memories had been stored on machines. However, Vergès claims that such appropriation betrays capitalism's ongoing need to colonise and Iggy Pop links Arthur Balfour and his 1917 declaration about a Jewish state to Banksy's opening a century later of the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem to make a statement that can't be chiselled off and sold. But, while Owner Wisam Salsaa explains the rationale of the enterprise and Abu Yamen (the owner of Banky's Shop) reveals that the artist told him to start stocking expensive gifts to sell to the well-heeled guests, Walid the Beast dismisses it as a joke in bad taste, as he saw his town change beyond all recognition when the Wall was erected in 2000 and security guards told him to say goodbye to the fresh air on the other side. Until Bethlehem becomes the new Berlin and removes its barricade, he will never believe in Banksy or his well-meaning, but self-serving gestures. 

A new screen study of Banksy is long overdue, as almost a decade has passed since he released Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010). Yet, despite the best efforts of the 33 year-old Marco Proserpio, this doesn't quite hit enough of its numerous targets to convince or satisfy. Writing with Christian Omodeo and Filippo Perfido, Proserpio finds himself overly dependent on the laconic delivery of the iconic Iggy Pop to slip some of his more sweeping assertions and snide asides past viewers too bamboozled with information and opinion to pay close attention to each utterance. However, there is plenty here to fuel lively post-screening debate and doubtless many will feel the urge to Google anthropologist Françoise Vergès to hear more of her refreshingly clear-sighted wisdom. 

On the technical side, Jacopo Farina's photography has a certain vérité bustle, although Proserpio and Domenico Nicoletti have a habit of cutting too frenetically, with the result that injudicious blinks can wipe out the names of numerous interviewees. The inserts featuring unidentified and untranslated Palestinian rappers also smack of trendy tokenism. Moreover, Proserpio never solves the problem of how to fill the void left by the infamously elusive Banksy himself. A couple of people presume to speak on his behalf, but the `friends have told the BBC' approach rings hollow. For all its flaws, however, this is a likeably bolshy, bold and reasonably balanced documentary that just needed to ask a few more awkward questions and linger a little longer on the answers.

Only the Bible has been translated into more languages than Antoine de Saint- Exupéry's 1943 novella, The Little Prince. Currently, more than 300 versions exist and, as Dutch documentarist Marjoleine Boonstra discovers in The Miracle of The Little Prince, the number keeps increasing. Moreover, this inspirational tome keeps being selected to sustain interest in tongues spoken by dwindling populations that are in danger of dying out. 

As the camera drifts across a parched African landscape, we hear an extract from Saint-Exupéry's text (read by actor Johan Leysen), in which the Little Prince encounters a serpent and asks why nobody lives in the desert. In a segment entitled, `The Mysterious Source', we meet Moroccan Lahbib Fouad, who has translated the book into Tamazight, which is spoken by nomadic Berber tribes and has been taught in schools since 2003. Poet Omar Taous reveals that the story reflects Berber civilisation and history because it's about searching and co-existence and we see random shots of daily life in remote settlements that seem to belong to another time, even though one shepherd uses his moped to ferry his sheep around. 

After images of moseying camels and children doing their homework by storm lanterns, we move into the second section, `A Dying Star', which introduces us to Norwegian Kerttu Vuolab, who decided to translate The Little Prince into Sami after the tragic drowning of her younger sister, Pirrko, when she was 11 years old. She lives in a wooden cottage in snow-covered woods in the Vuovdaguoika region and recalls how she was sent to boarding school and used to hide in the toilets from the girls who bullied her for being homesick and for being forbidden  to speak her native dialect. However, the librarian gave her a book to console her and she found in Saint-Exupéry's prose the friendship denied her by her classmates. Vuolab uses a snowmobile to tend her reindeer and reads a passage in which the Little Prince draws a bucket from a well and she sighs because the water that is so vital for life can also take it away. She devotes much of her time to her ageing mother and not only rejoices in the fact that she can reclaim part of her childhood through their closeness, but also thanks her for giving her a love of a language she compares to the night sky, with words coming and going like stars. 

The scene shifts to El Salvador for `The Prickly Rose', as we meet Jorge Lemus, who is working on a translation into Nahuat with Andrea Lopéz and Guillerma and Sixta Pérez. We learn the this language is also called Pipil and was once spoken by those resisting the Spanish invaders. However, when the local farmers rose up to demand land reforms in 1932, thousands were killed in a matter of days and it became too dangerous to speak Nahuat. Consequently, it was only used in the outlying villages and only around 300 people speak it today, with the majority of them being in their eighties or older. But Lemus is determined to give it a boost by providing a precise translation that will also stand as an act of proud defiance to show that a culture cannot be stamped out by intolerant overlords. 

Finally, in `The Absolute Ruler', we encounter Noyontsang Lamokyab and Tashi Kyi, who were forced to seek refuge in Paris after being driven out of Tibet. They also see their work as a political statement, as they resent the manner in which China has striven to eradicate the indigenous language and culture since the 1950 invasion. We see Lamokyab chatting on the phone to his elderly mother and going to a riding stable to reclaim the sense of freedom he had on horseback as a child. But he senses the difference, as the animals aren't able to roam and he is restricted as to where he can go. Kyi also mourns for the liberty she lost when her parents smuggled her into India so she could go to school. She had no idea she would never see them in person again and envies the Little Prince his ability to wander where his curiosity takes him. However, she is glad that she placed a dead bird she had found in her courtyard (and thought her cat, Chungchung, had killed) in the Seine so that it could go wherever the river took it. 

Following silent images of the landscapes that Boonstra had visited on her own travels, we hear the closing lines about the Little Prince's passing and the hope that he might one day return. It's a fittingly poignant ending to a quietly reflective meditation that touches upon the unifying power of language and literature, the preciousness of cultural identity and the need to preserve the past so that it can continue to impinge upon a present that is becoming increasingly detached from the ancestral ideals that had sustained so many civilisations across the planet for so long. This slight anthropological tract may not be a panacea against globalisation, but it makes its points with a poise to match the poetic visuals.

Finally, CinemaItaliaUK returns this weekend at the Genesis Cinema with three documentaries by Luca Vullo, who has long been based in London and, in 2013, served as a body language coach for Richard Eyre's National Theatre production of Luigi Pirandello's Liolà. Fortunate patrons will have caught previous screenings of Vullo's study of gesture and expression, La Voce del Corpo/The Voice of the Body (2011), and his insight into Italian migrants living in the UK capital, Influx (2016). However, there is also much to intrigue in the selected triptych, which leads off with Dallo Zolfo al Carbone/From Sulphur to Coal, which examines the conditions that Sicilian sulphur miners endured when they went to work in Belgian coal mines after the Second World War following an economic pact signed by President Luigi Einaudi. 

Following an animated travelogue that establishes the distances between the island of Lampedusa and the Italian and African mainlands, Ccà Semu/Here We Are provides a snapshot of everyday life for the natives who suddenly found themselves on the frontline of the migrant crisis following the Arab Spring, when 11-12,000 fugitives landed either under their own steam or after being rescued by the coastguard. It's clear that not all of the interviewees regard the ongoing situation with sanguinity, as the influx impacted upon the tourist trade on which the islanders depend since the decline of the fishing industry. But, while there is a hint of xenophobia in some of the comments, the frustration is directed more at the authorities in Sicily and Rome than the Africans who wander the streets waiting to be moved on to their next port of call. 

The sense that everyone on the island is waiting for something - whether it's the change of the seasons or their fortunes - pervades the film, which has been based on research conducted by Michela Franceschelli and Adele Galipò. What emerges is the contradictory nature of the Lampedusan temperament, which seems to change with the prevailing wind. However, as the aerial views and Daniele Banzato's seascapes confirm, this isolated rock is also a place of rugged beauty that clearly shapes the mindset of its residents. 

In addition to adding her two pennyworth, Sara Flamini also choreographs a mesmerising dance routine, although it's frustrating that there are no subtitles for the lyrics of the songs performed by Mary De Malta and Andrea Marino. For the record, the other talking heads declaring rejoicing in the defiant declaration of `Ccà Semu' are mayor Salvatore Martello, his predecessor Giusi Nicolini, parish priest Don Carmelo La Magra, Dr Pietro Bartolo, fisherman Giovanni Sanguedolce, entrepreneurs Nancy Capello, Gianni Luca and Gianluca Vitale, bartender Miriam Colapinto, writer Francesca Matina, local Northern League leader Angela Maraventano, singer Antoine Michel, farmer Concetta De Battista, marine protection agent Pietro De Rubeis, retiree Maria Grazia Caruso, Elena Prazzi from the Lampedusa Natural Reserve and Daniela Freggi from the Turtle Rescue, whose provides a fitting finale by releasing a visiting turtle back into the water to continue its journey. 

The final offering is Dallas in Prizzi, which opens with caption describing how the hillside Sicilian settlement of Prizzi was founded in 258 BC by the survivors of Roman sacking of the nearby town of Hippana. It was ruled by Byzantines, Arabs, Normans and the French and Spanish before becoming part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 during Il Risorgimento. American psychiatrist Dave Atkinson fell in love with the place the moment he saw it and became determined to bring this forgotten town in the province of Palermo out of the clichéd shadows to allow people to appreciate its unique atmosphere and the diversity of its culture. 

Atkinson invites painters Maria Haag, Olivia Cole and Frank Campagna to join him in the Good Friday procession and its accompanying Ballu di Diavulu or Dance of the Devils, which parish priest Don Francesco Carlino explains has been staged since the Middle Ages to commemorate the `Incontro' or the meeting between the risen Jesus and Mary Magdalene on Easter Monday. The frisson between good and evil and the religious and the secular impacts on so many aspects of life in Prizzi, which has been blighted by such tragedies as the 1992 Mafia murder of judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. But the younger generation is eager to change perceptions and fight back against indifference and unemployment to revitalise the town and its people. 

In order to show his affection for Prizzi, Atkinson has commissioned Cole, Campagna and Haag to produce murals at the bus stop, the school and the entrance to the town and the locals seem thrilled with the work. Cole produces a vision of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, while Haag depicts the hands of Jesus and Mary meeting over the masks of Death and the Devils and Campagna pays tribute to the martyred judges with a dual portrait. As Atkinson says in conclusion, ingrained impressions can be changed and friendships forged across time, distance and beliefs because culture will always triumph and unify. 

Impeccably photographed by Daniele Banzato to capture the extraordinary layout of Prizzi and the gloriousness of its architecture and surrounding countryside, this is a tourist board's dream. Accompanied by a beautiful score by Giuseppe Vasapolli, it feels a little worthy in places. But the interaction between the locals and the artists and their genuine affection for the Texan who became one of them is a pleasure to behold.