Reviews

Weaving striking archival footage with new performance material featuring actress Alba Rohrwacher, The March on Rome provides the perfect platform for Cousins to ruminate on the dark times of Mussolini’s rule and how fascism still lurks in the shadows. World-premiering Out of Competition at the Venice Film Festival it stands out thanks to judicious use of the powerful stock footage and photos provided by the Luce Archives.

A family road-trip with a difference, director Borja Alcalde Rubio’s The Sacred Family (La Sagrada Familia) - which world-premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival - blends mysticism with modern-day distractions all set against the stunning backdrop of rural Peru as the family use their journey to try and address fractures and tensions within the group.

A meandering meditation on the rhythm of life, the resonance of folk music and the history and charm of the Old Town of Edinburgh during lockdown, Edinburgh International Festival project The Ballad of a Great Disordered Heart is a film about how people are connected by history and music, with the central narrative driven by Edinburgh musician Aidan O’Rourke.

A fascinating delve into the lives of traditional Roma families in Romania, The Chalice. Of Sons and Daughters also doubles as an enthralling anthropological exercise tracking the impact that ancient customs have on the lives of young Roma couples and their future offspring.

A compassionate yet deeply harrowing delve into the important work done by the Croatian empowerment programme ‘I Am Much More Than My Trauma’ which helps women who were raped and traumatised during the Croatian War of Independence. Vedrana Pribacic’s film focusses on a handful of women taking part throughout the programme’s two-year duration.

Fledglings is a warm and engaging look at the lives of a handful of young and blind (or partially sighted) Polish children as they leave the care of their parents and head to a boarding school to learn the skills necessary to navigate the challenges to come. In this new world they have to develop new friendships and find ways to deal with the sad and worrying moments that they will naturally, at times, encounter.

Though sporting a rather plodding title, Conscientious Protectors: A Story of Rebellion Against Extinction is an engaging and rather compulsive documentary that offers fascinating insight into those few days back in 2019 when environmental campaign group Extinction Rebellion brought London to a virtual standstill and succeeded through civil disobedience in focussing much-needed attention on climate change.

This warm-hearted doc feels at times more like a classic tear-jerker with the seemingly mismatched pairing of an elderly Barcelona drag-queen and a wide-eyed young girl learning to appreciate each other. But in this film truth is more engaging than fiction as nonagenarian Gilda Love dramatically changes when he is asked to take care of an abandoned three-year-old.

When two Brazilian filmmakers in separate continents - one in Sao Paulo, the other in LA - decide to eschew messaging and social media, instead creating a manifesto of video-letter correspondence, the resulting film is an engaging delve into the lives of two intelligent and creative women as they reflect on art, politics, emotions and friendship.

It is a tough call to make a gripping documentary centred around economics, but it is to Chilean Carola Fuentes and Rafael Valdeavellano’s credit that their central characters are intriguingly complex, presented against a backdrop of the country’s popular revolts of 2019. The film world premieres in Rebellion Strand.