Parky at the Pictures (London Film Festival Special, Part Two)

The `It' Girl played by Bérénice Bejo is a clear reference to Clara Bow and another iconic siren provides the impetus for Grald Hustache-Mathieu's Nobody Else But You, which recasts the legend of Marilyn Monroe in a playful piece of pulpy neo-noir set in the snow-covered commune of Mouthe in eastern France. Luminously shot by Pierre Cottereau, novelist Jean-Paul Rouve's bid to discover the fate of mysteriously disappeared weather girl Sophie Quinton is made all the more tricky by the fact that seemingly everyone he meets has a connection with the mercurial blonde and, moreover, also has something to hide.

Regional cinema is becoming increasingly important to the French film industry and the eclectic Bruno Dumont fetches up on the northern Opal Coast for Hors Satan, a stark study in provocative realism that uses Yves Cape's widescreen views of the bleak landscape to emphasise the isolation of the outsider and examine the moral dimensions of drifter David Dewaele's brutally violent solution to the problems blighting his only friend, Alexandra Lematre. At the opposite end of the country, Robert Guédiguian returns to the working-class Marseille neighbourhood of L'Estaque for The Snows of Kilimanjaro, a treatise on proletarian solidarity and the fate of socialism that takes its inspiration from a poem by Victor Hugo and centres on the shocking consequences of union rep Jean-Pierre Darroussin and wife Ariane Ascaride accepting a cash gift and a dream trip to Africa for their wedding anniversary.

The peerless Darrousin is on equally fine form in Jean-Marc Moutout's Early One Morning, in which he plays a successful banker who becomes increasingly detached from wife Valérie Dréville and son Laurent Delbecque after new boss Xavier Beauvois criticises his efforts to help the company beat the recession and begins grooming junior executive Yannick Renier to take his place. Philippe Torreton gives a similarly imposing performance in Vincent Garenq's Guilty, an uncompromising adaptation of Alain Marécaux's account of his 2001 arrest and implication by complete strangers in a paedophile ring that questions the extent to which the principle of `innocent until proven guilty' applies in emotive cases of child abuse.

The fate of a young boy also changes Sandrine Kiberlain's life in Yves Caumon's The Bird, as she takes an undemanding kitchen job and seeks sanctuary in classic films like Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu to avoid confronting the reality of the tragedy that drove her apart from husband Bruno Todeschini and now keeps her distant from smitten chef Clément Sibony. Kiberlain's encounter with cinemagoer Serge Riaboukine finds echo in Corinne Masiero's resort to impersonal sex sessions in debutant Cyril Mennegun's Louise Wimmer, the story of another loner hiding from the painful reality of her past, who lives in her car when not being exploited as a hotel cleaner.

By contrast, 16 year-old Louise Grinberg receives the unqualified support of her friends when she discovers she is pregnant in first-time siblings Delphine and Muriel Coulin's 17 Girls, as they all decide to have babies, too, so they can deflect the criticism of their parents and raise the children communally. While this poignant drama transfers an incident that occurred in a Massachusetts high school to the port town of Lorient, Mathieu Demy returns to the Californian scene of mother Agnès Varda's 1981 film Documenteur to create a considered sequel in Americano, as he revisits the States to find the Mexican girl he knew as a boy. With Salma Hayek, Geraldine Chaplin and Chiara Mastroianni in supporting roles and containing clips of Varda's feature and the spirit of father Jacques Demy's American works, this is a personal and yet approachable directorial debut by an established actor, which keeps good company in LFF 2011 with new pictures by Mathieu Amalric and Mathieu Kassovitz.

In The Screen Illusion, Amalric brings Pierre Corneille's 1636 play L'Illusion Comique into the modern era in showing how hotel concierge Hervé Pierre is hired by Alain Lenglet to find his wayward son, Loïc Corbery, and uses CCTV to keep tabs on his relationships with computer games wizard Denis Podalydès and the rebellious Suliane Brahim, whose father (Jean-Baptiste Malartre) wants to marry her off to unworthy suitor Adrien Gamba-Gontard. By contrast with this slickly anachronistic verse variation on a Comédie Française classic, Mathieu Kassovitz's Rebellion presents an authentic recreation of events that took place on the Pacific territory of New Caledonia in 1988, when a band of Kanak separatists kidnapped a number of prominent locals and Captain Philippe Legorjus (Kassovitz) of the Gendarme Nationale had to find a peaceful resolution to the hostage crisis with the French army and politicians facing imminent election breathing down his neck.

Dominik Moll has made his reputation with similarly tense thrillers, but he changes tack with The Monk, a Surrealist adaptation of Matthew Lewis's 1796 novel that was previously filmed by Ado Kyrou in 1972, with a screenplay co-written by Luis Buñuel. Vincent Cassel takes the title role of the devout, but proud Capucin who is led astray by his lustful attraction to both Deborah François (a satanic envoy disguised as the victim of a fire) and Joséphine Japy, a chaste maiden who lives in a nearby castle with mother Catherine Mouchet, who hopes to marry her off to the affluent and earnest Frédéric Noialle. However, the twisted emotions that cause cinema projectionist Pascal Cervo to sin come from a very different source in Laurent Achard's stylishly deranged chiller, Last Screening. Warped by the movie-mad stage mother who wanted him to be a child star, Cervo resists the efforts of owner Nicolas Pignon to close down his backstreet venue and the allure of stage actress Charlotte Van Kemmel to seduce him. But he is powerless to resist the urge to kill and decorate the glossy pin-ups on his wall with grotesque souvenirs of his crimes.

The dark wit of this gory paean to Gallic cinema (which even includes scenes from Jean Renoir's 1954 gem, French Cancan) contrasts with the gentler humour in Emmanuel Mouret's The Art of Love, the lastest meld of Eric Rohmer and Woody Allen that links a series of vignettes about the vagaries of desire that stars François Cluzet, Julie Depardieu, Judith Godrèche, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Élodie Navarre, Gaspard Ulliel, Ariane Ascaride and Mouret and his longtime muse, Frédérique Bel. However, the comedy is more gleefully absurdist in The Fairy, the latest outing by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy, which sees Gordon check into the seaside hotel where Abel works and promptly falls in love with him after granting him three wishes. With an underwater ballet with a jellyfish and a race to save an imperilled baby among the highlights, this is another joyous throwback to the slapstick days of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd.

There's also a magical feel to Michel Ocelot's 3-D animation, Tales of the Night, a glorious demonstration of the silhouettist's art that gathers the stories told by a small group of friends who meet each night in a rundown cinema to relate and act out such tales as `The Werewolf', in which a cursed young man finds himself betrothed to the wrong princess; `Ti-Jean and Beauty Not Known', which follows a man on mission to perform impossible tasks in the Land of the Dead; `The Chosen One of the Golden City', which accompanies a stranger seeking to free a city from the legacy of its brutal past; `The Tom-Tom Boy', which centres on a drum with the power to make everyone dance; `The Boy Who Never Lied', which witnesses the wager between two kings intent on turning a truthful child into a fibber; and `The Girl Doe and the Architect's Son', in which a suitor has to rescue his beloved from the clutches of an evil sorcerer.

The fantasy quotient is equally high in another animated adventure, Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli's A Cat in Paris, which was scripted and produced by Jacques-Rémy Girerd and follows the fortunes of a cat named Dino, who spends his days being fussed over by his owner Zoe and his nights searching for priceless items to purloin with cat burglar Nico. However, an act of kindness leads to trouble, as Zoe's mother just happens to be the chief of police. Having made their names with Persepolis (2007), Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud abandon animation for live-action in adapting another of Satrapi's graphic novels, which is set in Tehran in 1958 and tells the story of quick-tempered musician Mathieu Amalric's sudden realisation that he wants to die because not only has his precious violin been damaged, but he is also unhappily married to the shrewish Maria de Medeiros and feels spurned because first love Golshifteh Farahani no longer seems to recognise him.

The visual stylisation and deft blend of wit and melancholy gives way to more plaintive sincerity in Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval's Low Life, a poetic dissertation on political asylum, prejudice, surveillance and policing methods that owes much to Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably (1977) in delineating the romance that blossoms between Camille Rutherford and Afghan refugee Arash Naimian after they meet during a student demonstration in Lyon. Another inter-racial liaison proves central to Belgian auteur Chantal Akerman's bold adaptation of Joseph Conrad's first novel, Almayer's Folly, which charts trader Stanislas Merhar's determined efforts to give daughter Aurora Marion a Western education and keep her out of the arms of rebel Zac Andrianasolo after he marries Malaysian Sakhna Oum at the behest of his employer, Marc Barbé.

Just as Marion flees her detested convent school, so 11 year-old Thomas Doret absconds from the children's home in which father Jérémie Renier had deposited him in Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's latest slice of life in the industrial town of Seraing in the Province of Liège. Despite the fact Renier sold his prized bike, Doret continues to trust him and begins to act up for hairdresser carer Cécile de France when he begins to learn the truth. An even younger child turns against her parents in Olivier Ringer's On the Sly, which features an outstanding performance by the director's six year-old daughter Wynona, as she hides out in the woods abutting the family's weekend retreat so she doesn't have to go back to the city.

With its references to magic seeds, this carefully staged study in junior survivalism has a fairytale quality that makes this a fine companion piece to Bouli Lanners's The Giants, a drolly subversive updating of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that follows adolescent brothers Zacharie Chasseriaud and Martin Nissen as they decide to enliven their summer holiday in the country by embarking upon an expedition in search of cash and smokes with local teen Paul Bartel. This jolly rite of passage contrasts markedly with John Shank's stark social realist saga Last Winter, which marks a remarkable debut for an American abroad, who shows an affinity with far away places similar to Peter Strickland's in Katalin Varga (2009), as he records 30 year-old farmer Vincent Rottiers's tenacious bid to stick to the methods pioneered by his father, while also juggling his relationships with vulnerable sister Florence Loiret Caille and local bird breeder, Anaïs Demoustier.

A sense of enchantment returns across the border in the Netherland, as diminutive Rachelle Verdel hatches out of an egg found by wizard Porgy Franssen and winds up causing mayhem in Annet Malherbe's sorcery school in Johan Nijenhuis's adaptation of Paul van Loon's much-loved book, Fuschia, the Mini-Witch. Complementing this Disney Benelux production is Joram Lürsen's The Magicians, in which young Thor Braun has to enlist the help of celebrate conjuror Daan Schuurmans after he accidentally makes assistant Java Siegertsz disappear for real during an amateur talent contest. And Jonathan and his sister Sophie are convinced that they have also vanished in Dane Esben Toft Jacobsen's CGI animation, The Great Bear, as they stray from their grandfather's garden during a summer visit and find themselves confronting a cruel huntsman who has designs on bagging a 1000-year-old bear with an unusual gift for woodland camouflage.

Norway has produced some of the most intelligent cinema for children in recent years, but the emphasis is very much on the grown-ups at LFF 55. Morten Tyldum's Headhunters is a slick, but sharp adaptation of a bestselling thriller by Jo Nesbø that stars Aksel Hennie as the recruitment guru whose luxurious lifestyle forces him to moonlight as an art thief. However, the seemingly golden opportunity to land the urbane Nikolaj Coster-Waldau a coveted job and relieve him of a valuable painting could lead to his undoing. Recovering addict Anders Danielsen similarly knows that he is facing his last chance as he travels from his rural rehab centre for a job interview in the Norwegian capital in Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31st. However, having already attempted suicide that morning, he is more intent on bidding his farewells than making fresh starts in this compelling and sensitively handled drama that is based on the same Pierre Drieu La Rochelle novel that inspired Louis Malle's Le Feu follet (1963).

The end also seems nigh for ace curler Atle Antonsen's mentor after he is diagnosed with a chronic lung disease in Ole Endresen's King Curling. However, even though he has just been banned from competing because of his own obsessive compulsive disorder, Antonsen forms buddies Jon Oigarden, Jan Saelid and Steinar Sagen into a new team to win the prize money needed to fund a life-saving transplant. Against this caustic account of growing old disgracefully comes Rúnar Rúnarsson's Icelandic saga, Volcano, which turns on the battle of wills between retired school janitor Theódór Júlíusson and his children Þorsteinn Bachmann and Elma Lísa Gunnarsdóttir after his long-suffering wife, Margrét Helga Jóhannsdóttir, lapses into a coma and he brings her home from hospital to care for her himself.

Alongside this act of atonement for his years of ill temper, Júlíusson renovates his old boat with grandson Ágúst Örn B. Wigum and a fishing vessel also provides the setting for Árni Ásgeirsson's Undercurrent, in which skipper Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson's sister, Nína Dögg Filippusdóttir, comes to suspect that trawlerman Víkingur Kristjánsson's death might have been more suspicious than crew mates Björn Hlynur Haraldsson, Gísli Örn Garðarsson, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson and Ólafur Egilsson are letting on. Maintaining a united front is also key to the Gothenburg scam exposed by Ruben Östlund in Play, which riffs on the mobile phone bullying operation run by a quintet of African immigrant lads (Anas Abdirahman, Yannick Diakite, Abdiaziz Hilowle, Nana Manu and Kevin Vaz) who delight in taunting victims Sebastian Blyckert, Sebastian Hegmar and John Ortiz before fleecing them.

The debuting Lisa Aschan relates a scarcely more wholesome teen tale in She Monkeys, which revolves around the crush that 15 year-old Mathilda Paradeiser develops on older team-mate Linda Molin after she is selected for an equestrian acrobatics squad. However, as the pair draw others into their increasingly dangerous games, Paradeiser's seven year-old sister Isabella Lindquist feels the need to explore her own sexuality. The tensions between siblings at opposite ends of the age range is captured with unflinching intimacy by documentarist Peter Gerdehag in Women With Cows, which follows 79 year-old Britt Georgsson attempt to maintain the dairy farm she inherited from her father, even though she is almost bent double with a back problem. But how much longer will her younger sister Inger be able to keep travelling to Sibbalt from the town, where she lives near her anxious daughter and grandchildren?

This fascinating insight contains snippets of old home movies and the archive footage proves even more compelling in Göran Hugo Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, which draws on Swedish TV news reports and Lars Ulvestam's tele-film Harlem: Voices, Faces to examine the role played in the struggle for Civil Rights in the United States by such courageous, but often contentious figures as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis and Louis Farrakhan. As Lelia Doolan reveals in Bernadette: notes on a political journey, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey proved equally divisive when she was elected as a MP for Mid-Ulster for the People's Democracy movement while still a 21 year-old student. Having witnessed the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972, she went on to co-found the Irish Republican Socialist Party, only to quit it soon afterwards and survive an assassination attempt while campaigning on behalf of the hunger strikers in the notorious H-Blocks. Now in her sixties, the firebrand dismissed by one opponent as `Castro in a miniskirt' remains passionately involved in politics and vehemently against the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland after decades of violence.

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya similarly refused to be silenced. However, as Marina Goldovskaya explains in A Bitter Taste of Freedm, her outspoken views on the war in Chechnya led to her murder in Moscow in 2006 and her killers have only recently been arrested. But, while Politkovskaya's determination to broadcast the `testimony of the innocent' is crucial, his is more a portrait of a remarkable woman than the `heart and conscience of Russia'. And the personal aspect is also key to Andrey Paounov's The Boy Who Was a King, which tells the incredible story of the six year-old who became Tsar Simeon II of Bulgaria on the mysterious death of his Hitler-supporting father in 1943, only to be banished by the Communists and then be elected Prime Minister by his former subjects in 2001. However, this is anything but a hagiographic profile, as those who reckon the ex-sovereign stood for office solely to reclaim lost property are also permitted their say.

The freedom to discuss the past has been one of the great boons of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and Radim Špacek returns to the 1980s in Walking Too Fast to examine the unholy alliance that is forged between secret police investigator Ondrej Malý and author Lubos Veselý so that the former can pressurise dissident poet Martin Finger into exile so he can make a move on his crane-driving mistress Kristína Farkasová. Bearing more than a passing similarity to The Lives of Others (2006), this is a more rigorous insight into the cynical methods of state intimidation and the ease with which the fate of ordinary people could be decided by an official whim. Sadly, the intolerance that blighted the Communist era is still in evidence in the treatment of the Roma population, as Martin Šulík reveals in the troubling drama, Gypsy, which was filmed in Roma dialect in the Slovak village of Richnava and centres on the problems that 14 year-old Jánko Mizigár has to endure after his father is brutally killed and his mother remarries. The need to leave a rural backwater and start again somewhere new also informs Zuzana Liová's debut, The House. However, ambitious teenager Judit Bárdos's chance of relocating to England depend on her rebelling against father Miroslav Krobot, who insists on completing work on the house he started building for Lucia Jasková, the older daughter whom he disowned when he discovered she was pregnant out of wedlock.

Combining hand-drawn, cut-out, collaged and stop-motion imagery, Anca Damian's Crulic - The Path to Beyond confirms the growing sophistication of adult animation. Narrated from beyond the grave by the eponymous Romanian (Vlad Ivanov), this expressive, but poetic account recalls how the 33 year-old decided to go on hunger strike after being jailed for stealing the credit cards of a judge in Krakow when he claims not to have even been in Poland at the time. Injustice is also the theme of Colombian Joshua Marston's second feature, The Forgiveness of Blood, which discusses the 15th-century Albanian legal code called the Kanun, which allows the family of a murder victim to claim retribution by killing a male from the culprit's clan. In this case, it's teenager Tristan Halilaj, who becomes a target for the relatives of hot-head Veton Osmani, who is stabbed by Halilaj's brother Luan Jaha after a right of passage feud with their father, Refet Abazi.

An inheritance quandary also sets the scene in Andrei Zvyagintsev's Elena, as ex-nurse Nadezhda Markina debates whether to honour devoted husband Andrey Smirnov's dying wish to bequeath his money to estrange daughter Elena Lyadova or use it to to help her own drunken son Slexey Rozin get his rascally heir Igor Ogurtsov into college. With a score by Philip Glass and typically rich imagery by Mikhail Krichman, this powerful study of parental responsibility is matched by Angelina Nikonova's Twilight Portrait, a searing allegorical indictment of modern Russian society that exposes the institutional corruption of a system controlled by oligarchs and Mafiosi, politicians and policemen through the story of social worker Olga Dihovichnaya, whose rape by a gang of cops led by Sergei Borisov prompts her to enter into an abusive relationship on top of her marriage to the ultra-conformist Roman Merinov and her neighbour lover, Sergei Golyudov.

An even more dystopian picture is painted by Alexander Zeldovich in Target, which suggests that the gap between rich and poor will be even wider in Russia in 2020, but that the country will be almost entirely in thrall to China. However, all wealthy Maxim Sukhanov and Justine Waddell can think of is undergoing a cosmic ray treatment at an abandoned astrophysics facility that can guarantee them eternal youth. Co-scripted by cult novelist Vladimir Sorokin, this almost Tarkovskyian exercise in philosophical science-fiction shares the striking production values of Aleksandr Sokurov's Faust. Designed in the grand Gothic manner by Elena Zhukova and imposingly photographed by Bruno Delbonnel, this reworking of the familiar tale has alchemist Johannes Zeiler sign away his soul to moneylender Anton Adasinskiy in the hope of romancing Isolda Dychauk and completes the `tetralogy of power' he started with the respective insights into the domestic lives of Hitler (Moloch, 1999), Lenin (Taurus, 2001) and Hirohito (The Sun, 2005).

Possession by uncontrollable emotions is further explored by Murat Imbragimbekov in There Never Was a Better Brother, a poetic dissertation on provincial ennui that harks back to Azerbaijan in the 1970s to show how Baku post office worker Sergei Puskepalis becomes increasingly frustrated by the reckless behaviour of younger sibling Evgeny Tsyhanov and his relationship with Nino Ninidze, the flirtatious daughter of a lower-class neighbour whom Puskepalis has been trying to seduce without his wife noticing. A remote spot on the Turkish steppe provides an even bleaker setting for Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, another study in duty under duress that follows police commissioner Yilmaz Erdogan, prosecutor Taner Birsel and doctor Muhammet Uzuner, as they wait for confessed killers Firat Tanis and Burhan Yildiz to remember where they buried their victim's corpse. Magnificently photographed by Gohkan Tiryaki to capture the ruggedness of the landscape and the effect upon it of the changing light, this is an intense, but often witty investigation into rural deprivation, the status of women and children, the interaction of strangers and the tolerance humanity in the face of absurdity, deception and death.

The final three themes recur in Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps, which centres on an eccentric group of Greeks who are paid for standing in for the recently deceased so that the bereaved can become accustomed to their loss. However, while paramedic Aris Servetalis keeps a close eye on coach Johnny Vekris and gymnast Ariane Lebed, he fails to notice that nurse Aggeliki Papoulia has started to freelance after becoming obsessed with 16 year-old tennis player Maria Kirozi. Once again produced by Athina Rachel Tsangari, this follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Dogtooth (2009) confirms the growing strength of Greek cinema since the Filmmakers in the Mist cabal pressurised the government into reforming the industry. However, it remains to be seen how it will cope with the worsening economic situation.

Thus, the powerhouses of Mediterranean cinema remain Spain and Italy and each is well represented at LFF 55.

Another fine performance by Peruvian actress Magaly Solier illuminates Fernando León de Aranoa's Amador, which sees a Bolivian maid enlist the help of ageing prostitute Fanny de Castro to hide the fact that bed-ridden charge Celso Bugallo has died so she can keep claiming the wage that shifty boyfriend Pietro Sibille needs to buy a new fridge for his flower-selling business. With two splendid twists in the tail, this companion piece to Chilean Alicia Scherson's Play (2005) shares an offbeat wit with Jonathan Cenzual Burley's feature bow The Soul of Flies, which meanders across the parched landscape in the company of half-brothers Javier Saéz and Andrea Calabrese, who meet for the first time at an abandoned railway halt in order to pay their last respects to the well-travelled philanderer father who acts as a kind of Castilian Godot to the bickering siblings as they grow closer during what turns out to be an eventful picaresque non-adventure.

With a jaunty score by Tim Walters and Andrea Calabrese complementing Burley's vibrant vistas and quirky take on life, this study in memory and loss finds echo in Alberto Morais's gentler and more reflective road movie The Waves, which travels between Valencia and the French border town of Argelès-sur-Mer with 80 year-old widower Carlos Álvarez-Nóvoa, as he seeks to come to terms with the post-Civil War experiences that still haunt him. And the aftermath of the conflict also informs Benito Zambrano's adaptation of Dulce Chacón's acclaimed novel The Sleeping Voice, in which María León leaves her village in Córdoba to be near pregnant sister Inma Cuesta who has been incarcerated in the Ventas women's prison near Madrid and becomes involved in brother-in-law Daniel Holguín's underground struggle against Francisco Franco's fascist regime.

A shift in political power starts the fun in Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope, as French cardinal Michel Piccoli is elected at the end of an interminable Sistine Chapel conclave. However, no sooner does the white smoke billow from the symbolic Vatican chimney than the new pontiff has a crisis of conscience and confidence and, as papal spokesman Jerzy Stuhr attempts to control the waiting media, Piccoli slips away from psychiatrist Moretti and his estranged shrink wife Margherita Buy to wander the streets of Rome and rediscover his faith in the words and actions of parish priest Salvatore Miscio and a theatre troupe performing Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. Less strident in its criticism than the Berlusconi-lashing satire The Caiman (2006), this is a witty, but thoughtful assessment of the papacy in the modern era and the terrifying responsibility attached to the throne of St Peter.

The Catholic Church also plays a significant role in Alice Rohrwacher's first fictional feature, Corpo Celeste, as 13 year-old Yle Vianello returns to Calabria with mother Anita Caprioli after a decade in Switzerland and consistently falls foul of the pious congregation as she prepares for her confirmation ceremony with unyielding priest Salvatore Cantalupo. Clearly influenced by the pared-down Dardenne aesthetic, this austere study of small-town Southern Italian life draws parallels with Emanuele Crialese's Terraferma, which itself owes much to Luchino Visconti's key neo-realist drama, La Terra trema (1948) and his own Stateside study of immigration, Golden Door (2006). Set on the Sicilian island of Linosa, the action turns on veteran fisherman Mimmo Cuticchino and grandson Filippo Pucillo rescuing pregnant Ethiopian Timnit T and her son Rubel Tsegay Abraha after their boat capsizes. However, Pucillo's widowed mother Donatella Finocchiaro is scared that harbouring the illegals will place an extra burden on the already impoverish family and land it in trouble.

Moldovan migrant Olimpia Melinte finds herself resorting to desperate measures to prolong her stay on the Italian mainland in twins Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio's Dardenne-influenced debut, Seven Acts of Mercy. Tired of stealing from hospital patients, she decides to kidnap a baby and exchange it for work documents. However, in holing up in elderly Roberto Herlitzka's apartment, she forges a bond with both the child and her hostage that jeopardises her plan. Another illegal finds solace in a sympathetic local in Andrea Segre's first feature Li and the Poet, as Chinese woman Zhao Tao risks the ire of the bosses who have virtually enslaved by befriending retired fisherman Rade Serberdzija after transferring from a Roman textile factory to work in a bar on the Venetian lagoon island of Chioggia. And completing this trio of unlikely liaisons is Cristina Comencini's When the Night, a bittersweet romantic melodrama that starts when young wife Claudia Pandolfi is advised to stop obsessing over her two year-old son and take an Alpine break. However, she soon strikes up a love-hate relationship with misanthropic mountain guide Filippo Timi, who is still seething after his wife left him and took their children with her.

The spotlight turns onto the upper echelons of Italian society in Andrea Molaioli's The Jewel, a slick conspiracy thriller based on the Parmalat scandal that boasts yet another superb performance by Toni Servillo, as the incorruptible finance officer who rises to the challenge when food tycoon Remo Girone expands the family firm too quickly and has to rely on some creative accounting (as well as a few well-aimed bribes) to keep the business bouyant. Stylishly photographed by Luca Bigazzi and including one of recent cinema's most dispassionate romances (between Servillo and the boss's ambitious young niece Sarah Felberbaum), this intelligent exposé of the fiscal sector finds a more disconcerting companion in Austrian casting director Markus Schleinzer's first outing behind the camera, Michael, which reveals the dark secret being kept by 35 year-old insurance executive Michael Fuith, who returns from the office each night to the 10 year-old boy (David Rauchenberger) he has been keeping in his cellar.

Evidently inspired by the case of Josef Fritzl, this chillingly matter-of-fact account of the last five months of the pair's `involuntary' co-habitation confirms the continued flourishing of New Austrian Cinema. As, indeed, do the notable directorial debuts of actor Karl Markovics and writer Marie Kreutzer. Adroitly shot by Martin Gschlacht, Breathing focuses on 19 year-old Thomas Schubert's struggle to find a suitable day release occupation from a Viennese young offenders institution and his sudden realisation, on being hired by a mortuary to transport cadavers, that a woman sharing his surname could well be the mother who gave him up for adoption as a child. Andrea Wenzl similarly learns the truth about her past in The Fatherless, as she returns for the first time in two decades to the country pile that once housed a commune for the funeral of its boorish leader Johannes Krisc, who fathered siblings Andreas Kiendl and Emily Cox with the long-suffering Marion Mitterhammer and mentored idealistic doctor Philipp Hochmair, who had a crush on Wenzl before she was banished following a hushed-up accident.

The treatment of women in a supposedly enlightened environment is one of the picture's main themes and documentarist Michael Glawogger follows it up in Whores' Glory, an unflinching profile of prostitutes working in three seedy venues: The Fish Tank in Bangkok, where the mostly Buddhist women are selected by number from behind a glass screen by the wealthy patrons; the multi-storey City of Joy that's home to 600-800 Muslim girls in the Bangladeshi trading centre of Faridpur before they are sold off to local slum brothels; and The Zone outside Reynosa in Mexico, where Catholic hookers speak frankly about sex and the independence their career `choice' has afforded them.

Rising German director Ulrich Köhler also ventures into the developing world for Sleeping Sickness, as middle-aged doctor Pierre Bokma battles to conquer the eponymous disease blighting remote areas of Cameroon and come to terms with his imminent return to the wife and teenage daughter from whom he has become estranged during his placement with an international aid agency. Another disillusioned professional, mathematician Peter Schneider, decides to drop out in Hans Weingartner's Hut in the Woods. However, he is joined in his forest retreat by Ukrainian boy Timur Massold, who was recently orphaned following his mother's overdose, and occasional visitor Julia Jentsch before reality shatters his hopes of happiness.

An unanticipated moment also ruins Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg's backpacking trip through Georgia in Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet, and not even experienced guide Bidzina Gujabidze can help them when they are taken by surprise in the vast wilderness of the Caucasus Mountains. Another happy couple has its life more mundanely turned upside down in Andreas Dresen's Stopped on Track, as 40 year-old Milan Peschel is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour shortly after moving into a new house and wife Steffi Kühnert has to keep up his spirits, as well as her own and those of their two young children, as the inevitable approaches. This life-affirming study of a dying man's last months is told with a meticulous care that also informs the Dreileben trilogy, which examines how the escape of a convicted killer during a compassionate visit impacts upon those who accidentally caused the crisis and the law enforcement officials called in to recapture the fugitive.

Christian Petzold's Beats Being Dead sets the scene by showing how Jacob Matschenz, an intern at the hospital in the rural town of Dreileben, unlocks the door of the sealed room in which Stefan Kurt is saying goodbye to his recently deceased mother. However, the focus shifts away from the manhunt to Matschenz's growing obsession with hotel chambermaid Luna Zimic Mijovic, which threatens to scupper his relationship with Vijessna Ferkic, the daughter of doctor Rainer Bock, who is sponsoring his medical studies.

The search for the missing Kurt only periodically impinges upon Dominik Graf's Don't Follow Me Around, as police psychologist Jeanette Hain is distracted from the case by a reunion with old friend Susanne Wolff and the realisation that they were both once in love with the same man. This central segment concludes with Kurt's apprehension, but Christoph Hochhusler proves that appearances can be deceptive in One Minute of Darkness, which reveals that city slicker Hain was wrong to dismiss local cop Eberhard Kirchberg and his cohorts (even though they have a tendency towards chauvinism and corruption), as the veteran chief delves into Kurt's supposed killing of a popular cheerleader and not only discovers that he was innocent of the crime, but that he was also the victim of his mother's tyranny. However, it may be too late to prevent another killing.