Parky at the Pictures (DVD 4/4/2019)

As Giuseppe (Nicola Sorci) comes by moonlight to serenade Mariagrazia (Sofia Stangherlin) in the remote village of Inviolata, it seems as though little has changed since the late 19th-century days of Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978). The hesitant song is accompanied by bagpipes and the happy couple are toasted with masala and biscuits. However, they announce that they plan to relocate to the city after their marriage, as picking tobacco as sharecroppers simply doesn't appeal. When a hen waddles into the kitchen, Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo) takes it back to the coop and is persuaded to takeover from the watchman looking out for the wolf prowling the hills. 

The next morning, estate agent Nicola (Natalino Balasso) arrives with local priest Don Severino (Marco Donno) to replenish supplies and to bless the workers in their endeavours. Praising the quality of their wine, Nicola jokes with the residents about their nickname (`the Poison Viper') for Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna (Nicoletta Braschi). But he warns them that they need to tidy up the place before her next visit and scolds them for allowing the wolf to eat the capons, as this makes them more indebted to the Marchesa than ever before. Moreover, he refuses to allow Giuseppe and Mariagrazia to leave without her express permission. 

The mischievous Pippo (Edoardo Montalto) steals the mirror off Nicola's mobylette and he rides away through the parched hillside to the basket lift that lowers visitors to the bridge over a shallow stream that separates Inviolata from the rest of the world. He watches as Lazzaro unloads the crates of tobacco leaves and gives him a packet of coffee as a reward. However, when he shows this to Antonia (Agnese Graziani) and the other girls, they tease him and claim that none of the village girls would ever want anything to do with him. 

When Marchesa Alfonsina rolls up in her car with her brattish son, Tancredi (Luca Chikovani), it's clear that the outside world is nowhere near as backward as Inviolata, as he has a flip phone and complains that he can't get a signal. Antonia has tidied up the villa that towers over the village and shows Lazzaro the holy pictures she has secreted in the various rooms. When the Marchesa ticks her off for serving from the wrong side at lunch, Antonia's siblings, Pippo and Stefania (Maddalena Baiocco), spit on the desert. 

While searching for his lapdog, Ercole, the bleach-blonde Tancredi runs into Lazzaro, who offers to make him coffee in the cave hideaway he uses when tending the sheep. His eager generosity intrigues Tancredi, who asks his mother what she will do when the villagers realise that they are being kept in form of servitude that has long been outlawed. She says they would be worse off if they were free and accuses them of being every bit as exploitative as she is because they treat the willing Lazzaro like a servant. Nevertheless, she has chairs brought out so that she and Nicola's spoilt daughter, Teresa (Giulia Caccavello), can watch the villagers threshing.

When dusk descends, Nicola notices that Tancredi has disappeared and Teresa orders the locals to search for him. When there's still no sign of him next morning, Lazzaro goes to the eyrie, where Tancredi informs him that they are co-conspirators in a kidnapping plot to get some money out of his mother. He wants to sign the ransom note in his own blood, but it too squeamish and Lazzaro readily cuts the tip of his own finger to provide a smudge. When he returns to tell Tancredi that the missive has been found (and dismissed as just another prank by the Marchesa), he is told that they are very likely half-brothers, as Tancredi's father was a womaniser who probably seduced his mother while she was washing clothes in the river. 

Impassive as ever, Lazzaro weighs up the idea, as they walk along a dried-out ditch. In joining Tancredi in making wolf howls, however, he neglects his chores and is reprimanded by the menfolk for slacking. Yet, when he tells Tancredi that he has to work, Lazzaro is accused of being a bad friend and he becomes so confused over what to do for the best that he contracts a fever after standing out in the rain. Waking in a panic that he has not taken Tancredi any food, Lazzaro sets out for the hideout. However, the young marquis has already started to panic and, realisng he has a phone signal, he calls Teresa and pretends he is under duress and needs his mother to pay the ransom as soon as possible. But Teresa decides to call the police and, in looking up at the helicopter flying overhead, Lazzaro loses his footing and tumbles over a ledge. 

Arriving in Inviolata, the district police chief is appalled to discover that the occupants have been tricked into believing that they are still serfs, as they have no idea that sharecropping has been outlawed because the village has been cut off since the bridge collapsed during a flood in the 1970s. He has trouble persuading them to cross the shallow beck and board a bus so that they can be registered and rehoused. But, only Antonia seems concerned about the whereabouts of Lazzaro, whose body is found by the prowling wolf. As we hear a story being related on the soundtrack about a wolf refusing to devour the body of a good mn, Lazzaro comes round and wanders home. 

On finding no one around, he climbs through an open window at the villa and seems nonplussed that it has fallen into a state of disrepair and is being burgled by Ultimo (Sergi López) and Pippo (Carlo Massimino). Recognising that Lazzaro doesn't pose a threat, they coax him into helping them load up their van with contraband and are beside themselves when he shows they where Antonia had hidden the good cultery. They refuse to give him a lift into town, however, and he has to make his own way into the wide world for the first time. 

Stopping to puzzle over a satellite station on the brow of a hill, Lazzaro follows some migrants to an outhouse, where the elderly Nicola (Antonio Salines) is sat in a motorised wheelchair and conducting a work-rate auction to see who gets hired to pick olives. He doesn't recognise the unchanged youth and drives him away. But, when Lazzaro reaches a garage being robbed at knifepoint by Ultimo and Pippo, they offer him a lift across the snowy countryside and he is recognised by their accomplice, Antonia (Alba Rohrwacher), who falls to her knees because she is convinced that Lazzaro has risen from the dead like his New Testament namesake. 

They are living with several other villagers in a disused tank beside the railway line and they are astonished to see Lazzaro looking so young. He asks why they no longer reside in Inviolata and Pippo reads him a newspaper cutting about `The Great Swindle' that resulted in `the Queen of Cigarettes' going to prison for entrapping and exploiting 54 souls who had no idea of their plight. Clearly, they had never been paid the compensation promised in the article (or they had frittered it), but no one seems bitter, as they scrape by on stale crisps and scams like selling the Marchesa's musical cigarette box to unsuspecting passers-by, who are so delighted at getting a bargan that they fail to pay attention as it's being wrapped. 

Keen to do his bit, Lazzaro points out the edible vegetation growing beside the tracks. He also reintroduces the group to Tancredi (Tommaso Ragno), after he recognises his voice calling for the now lame Ercole. Pony-tailed and portly, Tancredi is amazed to see Lazzaro and smiles when he shows him the catapult he had given him in the hills. Slipping back into patrician mode, he asks Lazzaro to hold the dog while he tries to scam money out of an engineer seeking to initiate a development on De Luna estate. Roaring with laughter after being chased out of the bank, Tancredi asks Lazzaro to show him where he is living. Ultimo takes an instant dislike to him, but Tancredi invites them to lunch at his townhouse and gives Antonia instructions that they are to wash and brush up for the occasion, as his wife despise riff-raff. 

In order to make a good impression, they spend money they can't afford on fancy pastries and arrive punctually on the doorstep. However, Teresa (Elisabetta Rocchetti) refuses to allow them inside and even has the temerity to ask if they can leave the sweets, as times have been tough since the bank stopped giving them credit. Antonia's parents are affronted by the request, but she hands over the tray and they shuffle into a nearby church because Lazzaro wants to listen to the organ music. On seeing the scruffy band, a nun jumps up from her pew and ushers them out into the night. However, the music follows Lazzaro and, as the organ falls silent, it accompanies the villagers as they push Ultimo's broken-down truck back to the silo and discuss the prospect of returning to Inviolata and claiming the land for themselves. 

Shedding a single tear, as he sits beside an astro-turfed tree growing under a streetlight, Lazzaro hits upon a plan how to help Tancredi. The next morning, he wanders into a bank to ask the tellers to restore his half-brother's fortune. However, he doesn't understand the need to queue and is mistaken for a robber when he admits that he has a weapon in his back pocket. As the clerks play for time, one of the customers realises that Lazzaro doesn't have a gun and leaps on him. Others begin to kick and punch him. But, as the defenceless Lazzaro falls to the ground, he sees the wolf watching over him and feels a sense of peace, as he slips into unconsciousness and the creature weaves through the snarled traffic before picking up speed in making its bid for freedom. 

Italian cinema has long had a traditoin of coat-tailing, with sword and sandle epics of the 1950s recalling the superspectacles of the 1910s, while comedia all'italiana had its roos in the so-called `white telephone' comedies of the Fascist era. Ever since Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (1942), however, the most enduring thread has been neo-realism and Alice Rohrwacher sprinkles a little magic realism over this exceptional saga, which was based on a true-life indenture scandal and also contains traces of such literary fabulists as Carlo Collodi and Italo Calvino. Yet, while Lazzaro has the feel of a latterday Pinocchio, it's also hard to avoid comparing Adriano Tardiolo's wide-eyed innocence with the guileless grace exhibited by Giulietta Massina in husband Federico Fellini's La Strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957).

Tardiolo excels as the holy fool wandering the byways of recent Italian political and cultural history, as Rohrwacher muses on the illusory nature of freedom and the fact that while the old aristocracy might have ceded its power to grasping oligarchs, the poor remain as disenfranchised and exploited as they were in feudal times. Indeed, many would agree with the Marchesa (played by Nicoletta Braschi, who, coincidentally, appeared as the Blue Fairy in husband Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio, 2002) when she claims that the peasants tied to the land had an easier time than today's urban fringe-dwellers, as they were not locked in the misery of realising they were slaves and could enjoy a modicum of contentment in knowing nothing about the greenness of the grass on the other side of the wall. 

The way in which Rohrwacher and production designer Emita Frigato keep the audience guessing about the precise temporal setting of the linked storylines is much more than a mere allegorical gimmick, therefore. But everything has its precise purpose in this exquisitely wrought picture, with Hélène Louvart's tactile Super-16 frames having rounded corners to reinforce the carefully calculated aura of faux nostalgia. Nelly Quettier's editing also has a precision to it, with the scenes of agricultural labouring recalling the construction of the charcoal mound in Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro volte (2010). 

Some might bridle at the Lazarus conceit, but Martin Scorsese was sufficiently convinced to sign on as executive producer and, frankly, the debuting Tardiolo (who looks as though he could have stepped out of a Renaissance portrait) is such a compelling presence that many viewers will be prepared to accept any far-fetched premise simply to keep returning his mesmeric gaze into the void. 

Born in Japan to Filipino parents, Shireen Seno has acquired a reputation as an experimental visual artist and film curator since settling in her ancestral homeland. In addition to serving in various capacities on such films as Lav Diaz's Melancholia (2008) and partner John Torres's Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song and We Don't Care About Democracy. This Is What We Want: Love, Hope and Its Many Faces (both 2010), she made her feature bow with Big Boy (2012). However, in returning to the theme of childhood, Seno looks set to make a deeper impression with her sophomore outing, Nervous Transition. 

It's 1987 and the citizens of Manila are still coming to terms with the ramifications of the People Power Revolution that had removed President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda from office after two turbulent decades. Eight year-old Yael Concepcion (Jana Agoncillo) lives with her mother, Valentina (Angge Santos), who works long hours at a shoe factory. Her father, Dodong (Cocoy Lumbao), sends the money from Saudi Arabia, as well as taped love letters that Yael likes to listen to and recite while Val is out. 

On arriving home from school, however, her first task is to clean her shoes with a box of tissues she keeps by the door. Yael also has a nightly phone conversation with a school friend, in which she has to answer as many maths questions as possible in a `mad minute'. She watches the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers on television and prepares and cooks miniature meals using a doll's stove, which is powered by a tealight in the oven door. 

Even when Val gets home, Yael has to maintain a 30-minute silence so that her mother can unwind. Later, while watching soaps together, Yael plucks the white hairs off Val's head, who records in a notebook the daily tally and the sum she gives her daughter for her efforts. The next morning, Val leaves Yael to get ready for school and she records her own voice on the tape repeating phrases  uttered by her father that she doesn't really understand. 

On returning from school (with her elbows wrapped in clean, white bandages), Yael asks her friend Wappy (Amos Dy Liacco Calaguas) to repeat some of Dodong's remarks about home cooking and chides her for not doing them in a deep enough voice. While listening to another tape, she prepares a mini burger on her stove and has to scramble to switch off the machine when she hears Val's key in the door. She's pleased to see her, but is forced to wait half an hour before she can talk. Later, when Val dozes off while having her scalp plucked, the television signal drops off and Yael pretends to use magic powers to make it return. 

One day, while she is listening to a tape by The Futures, Yael answers a knock at the door. But, while she knows Dodong's workmate, Kiko (Tracy Quila), she communicates with him through the patterned grille. He recognises the song and recalls that people used to confuse Dodong with his twin brother, Tino, who was the band's pin-up lead singer. Some even think that Val married Dodong by mistake because she thought he was Tino. Amused by how shy Yael is, Kiko tosses a jiffy bag over the screen and she is excited to feel that it contains three cassettes. 

Val tells Yael to remind her to get Tino to fix the boombox next time he comes because it keeps chewing cassettes (which Yael knows because she uses a pencil to rewind the tape when it spills out). As they watch their soaps, Yael asks Val how she avoids mixing up Dodong and Tino when they look so much alike. She mumbles something about birthmarks, tattoos and Dodong's left arm and leg being slightly shorter. But she quickly changes the subject by inquiring about school and hoping that Yael isn't wasting her time gallivanting around. Thinking Yael has gone to bed, Val records a saucy message for her husband, unaware that her daughter is listening (but not comprehending) at the door.

As the TV news reports on Typhoon Unsang, Val and Yael get a visit from Tino (Sid Lucero), his wife Sylvia (Nata Hilario-Cruz) and their three children, Tita Bette (Thea Yrastorza), Sophie (Alyssa Ashley Namilit) and Ina (Alexus Gelacio). They live in Japan and have brought some goodies with them and lots of friends drop round to see them. Yael asks Tino to fix the tape recorder, while his wife boasts about how much her life has improved since leaving Manila. Wary of her cousins, Yael looks on rather than joining in, as the guests tuck into some snacks. Tino fixes the boombox and plays a tape that makes people uncomfortable with its veiled intimacy, so he swaps it for a Christmas message. 

Val scolds Yael for listening to things that don't concern her and urges her to play with her cousins. However, she sits by herself and tries to ignore Tino when he peeps over her shoulder to see what she's writing. When her younger cousins dance for the assembled, Yael looks on impassively and shrugs when someone pays her a compliment about her neat handwriting. She fails to pick up on the chemistry between Val and Tino when the other discuss Dodong's disability and misses the wistful expression on her mother's face. Wandering into the next room, she sees the other kids watching a zombie video that seems to have them all perplexed. But Yael is intrigued by a Japanese advert for a Ningen pen that promises all its users `a beautiful human life'. 

Waking on the sofa next morning, Yael is surprised to find herself alone. The camera follows her through 360°, as she searches the house for signs of life. She occupies herself with her homework before she plays one of her father's tapes. However, Val catches her in the act and locks the cassettes in a drawer and bans Yael from using the boombox without permission. Sulking, Yael tippexes her name off a tape addressed to them both and Val is puzzled by her behaviour when she calls her to speak to Wappy on the phone. 

We see lines in Yael's exercise book referring to the coldness of a mother's hands and tears falling like rain. But she is becoming increasingly preoccupied with the Ningen pen and she imagines her cousins as zombies following a giant robot-like pen along the road. She spies on Val, as she tries to write a letter to Dodong, who feels cut off from his daughter and wishes she would speak to him or write. But Val scribbles over the paper, as she struggles for the right words to say. In a dream (or her imagination), Yael drags a suited male body along by its arms, but decides it's too much like hard work and pushes it off a bridge into the river. As she follows the corpse floating along in the darkness, she sees Val with what seems to be a film crew on the bank and she stops, as he mother squats on her haunches and stares out across the water. 

Taking her rabbit money box, Yael looks around the shops for a Ningen pen. However, she needs 50 pesos and has no idea how to raise that kind of money. She seeks out Val at the shoe factory and tries to catch her eye through the doorway, but her mother keeps working. As the storm whips up that night, Val is oblivious to the fact that Yael is eavesdropping while she records a message for Dodong. Taking advantage of her preoccupation, Yael runs out into the rain to buy some liquid paper, as she has had a brainwave to help her raise some funds. 

While looking around the house, she had noticed the streaked hair on a relief sculpture and climbs on to the sofa, where Val is sleeping, with the intention of streaking her hair so that she will have more white to remove. As she unscrews the lid, however, Val wakes because typhoon water has started seeping under the door and mother and daughter have to edge their way over the furniture to stay above the rising tide that is carrying away cassettes and photographs. 

After a while, the ambient sound fades away and images of the flooded room are replaced with meticulously photographed shots of submerged model rooms before a series of cuts reveals aerial views of tiny buildings around the neighbourhood, as debris floats past on the murky and deceptively tranquil water. Reinforcing the child's-eye perspective that has dominated proceedings, it's an exquisite way to end an attempt to imagine what life might have been like for Seno's own family during this period of transition and uncertainty had they not already left the Philippines for Japan. One is left to wonder, therefore, whether, in depicting Tino's clan, she is commenting on the airs and graces acquired by her own family during their period in exile.

With the television constantly commenting on the post-Marcos political situation, the film is full of such little ambiguities, like the true nature of Val's relationship with Tino is never resolved and the fact that nothing is said about Yael's reasons for listening to her father without ever responding to him. It's also left teasingly unclear how much the eight year-old is able to read between the lines, as she asks Wappy to repeat Dodong's phrases in a suitably deep voice. Does she also realise that she is apeing Imelda Marcos in taking such good care of her shoes (in a joke that is given a more serious twist by having Val work in a shoe sweatshop)? 

Already a domestic star after playing a toddler in the TV series, Ningning (2015), Jana Agoncillo gives a remarkable performance as the latchkey kid who is so often left to her own devices that she has become accustomed to finding ways of letting her imagination roam in order to keep herself amused. Angge Santos also impresses as the inscrutable Val, whose parenting methods are drolly contrasted with those of trophy wife Nata Hilario-Cruz during the family reunion that is frequently as excruciating as it is engaging. Agoncillo's unchanging expressions while watching her cousins and the movie zombies with whom she later equates them are particularly witty. 

Editing with John Torres (who also produces), Seno adopts a consciously episodic approach that seeks to replicate a child's limited attention span. Moreover, despite the occasional switch between Tagalog and English, she achieves a visual unity that belies the fact she employed a trio of cinematographers in Albert Banzon, Jippy Pascua and Dennese Victoria. She is much helped in this regard by production designer Leeroy New, who manages to make the spartan interiors seem cavernous when Yael is home alone and cramped the moment her mother walks through the door. Model maker Carl Joseph Papa also merits mention, while Itos Ledesma's score deftly captures the tonal shifts, as Yael slips between her own little world (in which she is her own miniature domestic goddess) and the harsher reality that Val seems incapable of escaping.

Already a bestselling author in her native France, Amanda Sthers is equally keen to be taken seriously as a film-maker. Those unconvinced by the six-storied airport saga, You'll Miss Me (2009), and the Toni Colette-Harvey Keitel class comedy Madame (2017), will find little to change their mind in Holy Lands, a drearily misjudge melodrama that benefits solely from the byplay between James Caan as a Nazareth pig farmer and Tom Hollander as the rabbi trying to put him out of business, which vaguely recalls the dynamic between parish priest Don Camillo Tarocci and Communist mayor Peppone Bottazzi in the comic novels of Giovannino Guareschi. 

Retired New York cardiologist Harry Rosenmerck (James Caan) has left ex-wife Monica (Rosanna Arquette), playwright son David (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and photographer daughter, Annabelle (Efrat Dor) Stateside to settle outside Nazareth and rear pigs. He rootles around on his small property and has problems with a hand-reared piglet who keeps getting into the house at night and trying to clamber into bed with him. Vehemently opposed to his business is rabbi Moshe Cattan (Tom Hollander), who has placed warning signs around the neighbourhood and keeps writing letters threatening to take action unless Harry closes down. When he finally replies, Harry lets Moshe know in no uncertain terms that he has no intention of buckling while a café in Tel Aviv keeps taking orders for his bacon.

David is also a regular correspondent and he scribbles a nagging note while watching a rehearsal of his latest production, Origins, which is rooted in his difficult relationship with his father and the fallout of his revelation that he is gay. Annabelle is also having problems, as she can't make her rent and asks Monica to call her father and drop a hint about a handout. However, Harry is too preoccupied to listen when Monica calls and doesn't take in that she is going for an MRI scan because she has been having dizzy spells. 

While she learns she only has a year to live from Dr Michel (Patrick Bruel), who has adored her from the day she first met Harry, Annabelle leaves Brussels with a broken heart and write to her father about how much she needed his shoulder to cry on. She arrives in time for opening night and they see Monica in the audience, as the lights dim and a piece of interpretive dance is followed by the comic epistolary exchanges between the characters David has based on his parents. Many miles away, Harry is have a contretemps of his own with Moshe, when he comes to the rabbi's door to snap a protest sign over his knee and threaten to clout him if he keeps harassing him. They meet again shortly afterwards at a bus stop, as Harry is going to the cemetery to visit his mother's grave and Moshe has to apologise for sarcastically asking if he's going on a date at his age. 

Returning home to find his piglet (now named Judas) has run amuck in his living room, Harry muddles along, while David sends him a letter about helping Annabelle develop the pictures she had taken on 9/11 and left on the roll because she was unable to face what they might contain. He confides that he had always felt responsible for the Twin Towers, as that was the day he had first slept with another man. Annabelle is planning to visit Harry and Monica entrusts her with a message to insert into the Wailing Wall. Meanwhile, Harry receives a visit from a Belgian priest (Thibaut Pira Van Overeem), who wants him to move off the land because the Pope has identified it as the place where Jesus lived with Mary and Joseph. But Harry is no more amenable to him than he has been to Moshe, although he has accepted the latter's invitation to Shabbat supper. 

Having called Monica to hear her news, Harry is feeling low and Moshe and his wife Rivka (Reem Kherici) try to cheer him up during the meal. One of their small children even offers him a teddy bear to cuddle and they making grunting noises when he bunks down for the night in their room because he is too tired to drive home. Annabelle has also found out about Monica by reading her note on the plane and she seeks solace in the arms of a stranger when the air-raid siren sounds while she is photographing a Tel Aviv beach party. David also needs some tlc when his adoption application is rejected because of his homosexuality and lover Lawrence (Thierry Harcourt) promises that they will find a child somehow, even if it means stealing an ugly duckling from the park.

Much to his surprise, Harry makes a connection with Moshe's youngest son, when he collects him from school and he delights in bottle-feeding Judas in the front seat. By contrast, Annabelle has a run-in with an Israeli soldier (Guila Clara Kessous) when she goes to the place where she had spent childhood summers and is appalled to see the Wall scarring the landscape. She criticises the treatment of the Palestinians at the checkpoint, but the trooper refuses to listen to her sentimental outsider claptrap and sends her on her way. When she finally arrives at the farm, Harry slaps her for not letting him know where she was and they patch up when they visit her grandmother's grave and they wonder why people bury themselves when they're alive and dead.

With Monica taking Harry's advice to enjoy herself with Michel, Annabelle goes to the Wailing Wall and returns to find Harry dozing in a chair. She takes the key to his locked upstairs room and finds the wall covered in cuttings about David and a drawer full of her letters. Back in New York, she discovers she's pregnant from her tryst at the beach and Monica accompanies her to a scan. They go to see a movie in 3-D, but Monica refuses to wear the glasses and leaves early so she can go and berate the first grade teacher she has always hated for giving her daughter a hard time. She also tracks down the drama critic who had dismissed David's play and throws a glass of water in his face in a restaurant and tells him to stop being so mean.

On a Dead Sea beach, Harry and Moshe wear mud packs and debate the reasons why Jews oppose the keeping and killing of pigs and Harry wishes they could agree to disagree and jokes that Muslims have it right when they accuse Jews of over-thinking things. Having floated in the sea, they drive home singing along to Jimmy Cliff's `Many Rivers to Cross'. However, they find a burning cross outside the farm and Judas slaughtered on the front step and Harry grabs a baseball bat and asks Moshe to drive him to the church where the Belgian hangs out. As he swings at the votive candles, however, he suffers a seizure and Moshe has to steel himself to run into the church and help him. 

While Harry recovers in hospital, Lawrence threatens to leave David unless he goes to see Monica, who has suddenly started to fade. He accuses him of hiding behind his father's emotional coldness and pleads with him to open the door the next time Monica returns his washing. But they stand on opposite sides of the door with their hands pressed against the wood and Monica dies soon after going on a shopping expedition to buy her granddaughter presents that will take her through to 21, so she can always be her fairy grandmother. Annabelle's waters break when she bangs on David's door to tell him and he rushes her to the hospital. 

On hearing the news, Harry dictates a letter to Moshe so that David knows he sobbed on losing the love of his life, as he hadn't on the passing of the mother who had survived the camps when his father had perished. In his mind's eye, he has always thought of his son as the boy he had invested so many hopes in and that his silence was filled with as much love, even though he could never hear it. Harry thanks Moshe for his friendship and he posts the letter on his behalf, as we see Annabelle's monochrome photograph of the family that somehow stayed together, even when it was apart. 

Crammed with contrivance and gushing with schmaltz, Amanda Sthers's adaptation of her own novel would be almost unbearable to watch without the sequences involving James Caan and his impish piglet and his badinage with Tom Hollander. Sthers switches the action revolving around Caan's loved ones from Paris to New York, but she singularly fails to persuade the audience to feel anything for the dying Rosanna Arquette, the preening Jonathan Rhys Meyers and the bland Efrat Dor. She doesn't help her cause in this regard by frequently inserting dance routines from Rhys Meyers's ghastly play to comment on the cumbersome melodramatics. But the dialogue the threesome is saddled with is far inferior to the spikier exchanges between Caan and his religious persecutors. 

More relaxed here than he was in Carol Morley's Out of Blue, Caan revels in playing the provocateur. But the decision to explore his backstory solely in the voiceovered letters misfires, as the details feel like throwaway remarks rather than vital clues to understanding his personality. Indeed, even the burgeoning friendship between Caan and Hollander feels forced, as their antagonism falls away too conveniently. However, they share a chemistry and Hollander more than holds his own in playing a variation on his vicar character in the BBC sitcom, Rev (2010-14). Both are upstaged by Judas, however. 

While some may be surprised by the slightness of Sthers's insights into love, family, faith and death and the heavy handedness of much of her direction, she partially atones with her use of the Israeli locations and cinematographer Régis Blondeau's deft contrasts between the interiors designed by Françoise Joset and Shahar Bar Adon. But Grégoire Hetzel's saccharine score keeps reminding us of how mawkish and unpersuasive this all is.

There have been numerous documentaries over the last decade or so about the ways in which food is produced, packaged and consumed. Among the best are Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Our Daily Bread (2005), Robert Kenner's Food Inc. (2008), Katja Gauriloff's Canned Dreams (2012), Valentin Thurn's Taste the Waste (2011) and 10 Billion: What Will We Eat Tomorrow? (2015), and Andreas Pichler's The Milk System (2017). Dochouse now adds to the list with Stefano Liberti and Enrico Parenti's clumsily titled Soyalism, which is showing in London over the next week under the auspices of Dochouse. 

Pig farming was once a family concern in the United States. But the switch to factory farming led to companies like Smithfield concentrating production in Iowa and North Carolina. As Rick Dove of the Waterkeeper Alliance explains, however, the business is now dominated by the Chinese company, Shanghuai-WH, whose record on environmental health he deplores. Taking a flight over some of the slaughterhouses in North Carolina, he claims that the landscape is pocked with untreated cesspools that are having a ruinous effect on the state's fragile eco system. 

Taking to the roads, Chris Breen points out the waste pipes leading from eight giant hog barns into a lagoon. He acknowledges that politicians claim to have brought jobs to a poor rural area, but Breen insists that they are badly paid for arduous tasks and have to put up with the foul smells of the cesspools and the dangers posed by polluted water. Near a spraying field, he calls on Elsie Herring, whose mother was born on the family land in 1902. But she was threatened by the son of the farm owner who informed her that he could do anything he wanted and get away with it and an appearance in court proved he was right. Elsie reveals that she can't open the windows when spraying is taking place and describes how vile the chemicals used to treat the hog waste are. 

We drop in on former pig farmer Don Webb, who shows us the tractor his father bought that replaced his mules. He raised pigs to supplement his income as a schoolteacher, but decided to quit when a local shopkeeper complained about the odour from the cesspool. None of the big corporations share Don's sense of community, however, and Christopher Leonard, the author of The Meat Racket, laments the fact that 90% of small American hog farms disappeared in the 1990s. As we see abandoned farmsteads and an animated countryside has its small concerns replaced by industrial plants, Leonard outlines the `vertical integration' method that sees single companies own the piglet nurseries, the feed mills, the trucking lines, the slaughterhouses and the processing facilities in order to maximise their profits and take complete control of the process. 

He denounces those who allowed Smithfield to take a 30% share of the US pork industry, as it made the company a tempting target for a foreign takeover. Don Basse, a trader with Agresource on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, describes how changes in Chinese dietary habits around the turn of the century led to it building a 47% share of global hog production to meet growing demand. He confidently predicts that other developing nations (including those with large Muslim populations) will also soon be eating more meat and Chinese companies have recognised the potential gap in the market.

Environmental analyst Janet Larsen concurs that Smithfield was an inevitable target for Shanghuai-WH, as they wanted to learn the American secret of producing so much meat on such small amounts of land. Mindi Schneider, an agrarian and environmental expert from ISS in The Hague, agrees that the Chinese wanted to import new methods, but such large scale production proves problematic because the fertilising waste that would be an asset on a small farm becomes a liability in a factory space. 

Tom Weis, the author of The Ecological Hoofprint, reveals that slaughter porcine rates have risen from under 10 billion per annum in 1960 to 120 billion by 2050 and he avers that this trajectory of `meatification' is unsustainable. He also outlines how industrialised livestock operations command about a third of the world's arable land and the bulk of the coarse grain production (maize) and oilseeds (soybeans). Given these existing amounts, Larsen is concerned that the Amazon rainforest will be sacrificed to grow the feed needed for edible livestock if Chinese consumers ever start eating as much meat as their American counterparts. 

Heading to Brazil, we meet Maria Arruda, who is appalled that local farmers sold out to the big corporations, while Rodrigo Pozzobon, who makes a good living from the crop, says it has transformed the economy and the forest soil is highly receptive to the various varieties of soybean. Ex-landowner Otaviano Piveta, who was able to acquire new fields cheaply, also has nothing but praise for the soy business, as it has made him rich. But Joao Pedro Stedile, the founder of the Landless People's Movement, complains that only five companies - Bunge, Montsanto, ADM, Cargill and Dreyfus - control the soybean market and have manipulated it to their own advantage in persuading livestock concerns that theirs is the most cost effective feed. In the process, he claims, they have turned the planet into an enormous pigsty. 

Geographer Gustavo Oliveira berates the agri-giants for tipping the table so suit themselves and we meet a number of small farmers in Belterra, who despair that they simply can't compete with the colonisers who have stolen the land and the market. One grumbles that none of the tax revenue generated by these concerns remains in the area and, as a consequence, the poor are punished twice over. Another notes that the pesticides used by the corporations merely drive the insects on to their land to consume their crops. They wonder why the Americans and Chinese have to come to Brazil and ruin lives rather than court unpopularity with their own people. In frustration, one chap urges them to go to Africa instead. 

We head to Mozambique, where Brazilian farmers were able to pick up land at knock-down prices in order to grow soybeans for China. However, as one farmer states, the government failed to consult the local growers and, as a result, land that was used for staple crops was converted to soy, which isn't part of the Mozambican diet. Land rights activist Jeremias Vunjanhe reveals that the Pro-Savana company behind this initiative was an umbrella body whose seizure of water supplies and natural resources has impacted on the lives of five million people in the Nacala Corridor. He tours the region warning communities not to sign documents relating to land issues, as the multinationals are not averse to duping and intimidating those who produce 90% of the food consumed by their compatriots. 

Back in Brazil, Greenpeace's Romulo Batista shows on a map of the so-called `deforestation arch' how 62% of this vast area has been taken over by the soybean monoculture. Larsen explains how tilling this land releases greenhouse gases that have a deleterious effect on the local eco-system and Weis and Stedile discuss the impact of fertilisers and the emissions connected to the processing the beans before they are shipped back to China. The latter is furious that Brazil now uses 20% of the world's pesticides, while the inputs that are being ploughed into the soil will inevitably change the balance of the region's biodiversity. He laments that animals and humans are being driven from vast tracts of land that only require machines to produce crops offering few, if any local benefits.

It's noted that Beijing doesn't want another famine claiming the lives of 36 million, but there are ways of going about things and the current methods are potentially calamitous for the planet. Stedile highlights the transport implications of shifting soy from the Mato Grosso to Chinese hog plants and wonders why they don't use their own rural expanses. He also raises the issue that chickens and pigs fed on standardised crops now taste the same the world over, which wasn't the case when farming was localised. Oliveira explores the idea of food sovereignty, while Weis suggests that we need to rethink agriculture and diet in tandem to prevent the rise in meat consumption that is currently causing so many problems. 

We meet organic farmer Jude Becker, who describes how his pigs are reared to put back into the land that feeds them. He admits it's a delicate balance and that profit margins aren't huge, but he insists it's the way forward. The problem, as Leonard reveals, is that small concerns that enjoy a degree of success are tempted to expand and eventually become targets for the big companies who are always ready to snuff out a competitor by bringing it into the fold. In California, Bill Niman reveals how he tried to establish a farm similar to the one on which he'd grown up in Minnesota, but wife Nicolette Hahn Niman (the author of Righteous Porkchop) says the government is only interested in helping the big boys because they have the financial clout and, consequently, independents will always be left to face an uphill struggle. She also notes how such a system jeopardises the security of the American food chain.

Schneider also thinks it's disturbing that a tiny group dictates what we eat and where we buy it without paying any heed to the health implications. Organic farmer Calvin Nachtrab concurs in worrying about universities colluding with the agricultural behemoths to determine how to fatten animals at the fastest rate on the lowest food consumption. He also bemoans the fact that customers in supermarkets will usually take the cheaper option because times are hard and money is tight. But they have no idea what they are eating or the long-term effects it can have on their health. Another old boy sits in his rocking chair and declares that a time will come when meat eating will have to stop because someone will realise you can feed more people with soybean and grain than you can with flesh. 

A closing caption state that China plans to halve meat consumption by 2030, even though meat and soy imports are still skyrocketing. Another blames the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico on industrial livestock farming and the related corn-soybean monoculture, while we learn that Brazil has now set aside an area the size of France to grow soy. However, the government of Mozambique struck a blow by outlawing Pro-Savana and a final piece of animation shows a single farmer proudly standing on his plot of greenery while all around him is soulless industrial grey. 

What is it about documentaries and a reluctance to identify on-screen speakers who don't have fancy job titles or letters after their name? It's like foreign-language films that insist on printing white subtitles on bright backgrounds that obliterate the lettering. Sort it out, people! Surely, you want audiences to be able to understand what is being said by non-speakers or a particular language and why would you not want to show a contributor the courtesy of addressing them by name? In fairness to Liberti and Parenti, their subtitles are mostly readable. But the decision only to list the names of the majority of the farmers they spoke to in the closing crawl is poorly thought through. 

Which is a shame, as they make their arguments cogently enough and only occasionally make sweeping claims and/or associations. Given that the picture only runs for 65 minutes, they might have said more about the conditions in which battery animals are kept, even though this has been covered effectively elsewhere. They might also have included a few more counter-arguments, as we only hear from a couple of Chinese and Brazilian speakers about the perceived benefits of the system that has enriched them. The absence of any corporate or governmental input is unsurprising, but a caption might have disclosed whether any opinions were sought from these quarters, as even the most trenchant advocatorial actuality could use a little balance.

To many, Alex Winter will forever be remembered for goofing off with Keanu Reeves in Stephen Herek's Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) and Pete Hewitt's Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991). Indeed, such is the enduring popularity of the doofus duo that long-circulating rumours of an overdue follow-up were recently confirmed by the news that Bill & Ted Face the Music is finally in production. But the British-born Winter has also developed into a fine documentarian and he follows studies of Napster (Downloaded, 2012) and the darknet market (Deep Web, 2015) with The Panama Papers, which is showing in London under the Dochouse banner. 

In 2015, an anonymous whistleblower named John Doe contacted the Munich-based newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, about a vast data dump gleaned from the Panamanian legal firm, Mossack Fonseca. Bastian Obermayer happened to be the journalist who took the call and immediately realised that he was being offered a scoop linking some of the world's most powerful political leaders and countless respected celebrities with a tax haven scheme that confirmed that the richest élite played by a different set of rules. Claiming to be merely a concerned citizen. Doe released the documents with a manifesto, in which he denounced the greed and duplicity of those who abused the power that had been entrusted to them. 

Obermayer shared the story with colleagues Katrin Langhans and Frederick Obermaier, who explain how offshore companies are used to allow people to own or invest in businesses without their participation being publicised and how the practices of money laundering and tax evasion are helping the wealthiest 1% protect their assets while leaving the rest of us to foot the bill to which they refuse to contribute. As they sifted through the files, the reporters began to recognise names like Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Pakistani president Nawaz Sharif, Icelandic prime minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson and the unholy trinity of Vladimir Putin; David Cameron and Donald Trump. Realising the danger that such information posed, they decided to share the story with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in Washington, DC on the basis that there should be safety in numbers. 

Deputy director Marina Walker Guevara notes that the ICIJ was founded two decades ago to break the mould of `lone wolf' journalism by pooling resources to tackle complex issues from multiple perspectives. Director Gerard Ryle admits that he was initially sceptical about the Panama Papers because the ICIJ had covered offshore stories before, but colleagues like Emilia Diaz-Struck and Matthew Caruana Galizia were impressed by the sheer volume of information and they worked on database named Blacklight and Linkurious to sift the data and make it searchable so that users could identify connections between the people and the companies mentioned in the Doe files. 

Following the Süddeutsche Zeitung lead, ICIJ decided to share its findings and turned to trusted agencies like McClatchy in Washington and Reykjavik Media, where investigative reporters like Kevin Hall, Marisa Taylor and Johannes Kr. Kristjánsson realised that they were being presented with chapter and verse on how a murky underworld worked and how the rich and powerful exploited it to hide their dealings. Guardian foreign and financial correspondents Luke Harding and Juliette Garside were also contacted and they soon saw that this could match the Wikileaks and Snowden revelations. Moreover, Matthew Caruana Galizia enlisted the help of his journalist mother, Daphne, to inquire into the dealings of Maltese cabinet ministers Konrad Mizzi and Joseph Muscat and expose the extent to which the George Cross island's institutions had become so corrupt that they had fallen victim to `state capture'.

Harding and Guardian deputy editor Paul Johnson admit that they had believed offshore culture to be small beer before seeing the Panama Papers, which convinced them that such dealings now dominated the world of high finance, with $3.1 trillion being secreted away each year to cost governments worldwide of billions in tax revenues. Indeed, as Walker Guevara declares, there were `French Revolutionary' levels of inequality being sustained by a secret network that people had to realise was profiting at their expense. Captions reveal how withheld US tax revenues could have improved social services and Doe's manifesto avers that capitalism has become a form of economic slavery that is abetted by the major financial institutions, who are prepared to handle tainted money as long as it has been cleaned up a bit.

Over footage from Michael Cimino's Scarface (1983), tax attorney Jack Blum explains how the system works through a case he worked on involving a drug trafficker with contacts in the Cayman Islands and he shows how corporations and bank accounts are opened to shuffle money through the system without leaving an incriminating paper trail. By the summer of 2015, however, over 100 journalists worldwide working on the Panama Papers are beginning to piece things together. They had established a rule of `keep quiet and encrypt' to ensure secrecy and Joseph Menn from Reuters was impressed by how portions of the story were shared out so that local angles could be exploited.

Obermayer was worried about bringing in Panamanian journalists, as he didn't know anyone he could trust. But Rita Vásquez from La Prensa was chosen and she concedes that she was scared when she first saw the names involved, as they were powerful people who weren't going to take exposure lightly. However, she had the backing of founder Roberto Eisenmann, who was committed to helping ordinary citizens regain control of their country. English editor Scott Bronstein knew several people at Mossack Fonseca and was aware that this story was going to transform his and wife Vásquez's lives. He was also curious about John Doe and the risks he was taking and several of the participating journalists concur that he or she was dicing with death in making the data available. Interestingly, Obermayer reveals that numerous outlets passed on the Panama Papers, as they didn't want to collaborate on the story or lose the services of expensive investigative reporters who could be getting them scoops that could arrest falling circulation figures. But the media crisis proved crucial to the effective pooling of resources and the successful dissemination of the story.

As reporters continued to delve, names began to emerge like footballer Lionel Messi, FIFA chief Gianni Infantino and Russian cellist and Putin confidante Sergei Roldugin. But there were also patsies being used by the wealthy, as McClatchy's Tim Johnson discovered on looking into the dealings of Leticia Montoya, a Panamanian secretary who was a director in 10,969 corporations and had no idea about the dealings of the companies she was fronting for. Moreover, she made no money from lending her name, as she lived in a poor fishing community outside Panama City and Blum and Bronstein despair of the fact that banks and other financial institutions are complicit in such shady transactions because profit is a bigger incentive than morality.

While major players in China and Brazil were implicated and British Prime Minister David Cameron was required to explain the presence of his father's name in the Panama Papers, the biggest fish was Donald J. Trump. No one was particularly surprised to find his name cropping up repeatedly, but the detail of the information relating to the Trump Ocean Club in Panama raised eyebrows and Blum is one of many to suggest that the US President has cosied up to kleptocrats to con the public into believing that such dealings are the new normal. Close associates including campaign manager Paul Manafort and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin are also implicated in the documents and Oregon senator Ron Wyden (who is seen grilling Mnuchin at his Senate hearing) wants citizens to know that they are the victims of such crookedness, as they can't avoid or evade compulsory tax demands and suffer because the powerful can. 

Moreover, such offences are no longer being committed in offshore havens, but in states like Nevada, Wyoming and Delaware. Nevadan politician Dina Titus confirms that the state has welcomed limited liability companies as their revenues allowed the legislature to court popularity by not raising tax levels for ordinary citizens. However, Britain and its former colonies are also knee-deep in the mire and John Doe appealed in his manifesto for bodies like the European Union to take a stand on the connection between the ruling classes and the financial élite to prevent it becoming more self-perpetuating than it already is. 

By January 2016, 376 journalists were working on the Panama Papers story and Obermayer and Obermaier at Süddeutsche Zeitung grew nervous that something might slip out, as more local partners came aboard. Moreover, they were concerned that a breach would tip off those implicated in the case and that they would seek legal redress to prevent the findings being published. Obermayer was also worried about protecting John Doe and had all the devices that had been used to communicate with him destroyed. The need to ask those involved for comments also risked jeopardising the scoop and Vásquez recalls having to be given a bodyguard to protect her, while Obermaier remembers the strain of having to e-mail Vladimir Putin about the findings and being afraid when press secretary Dmitry Peskov made a veiled reference to the communication in his denial that the Russian president had anything to hide. Walker Guevara reflects on threats received by the ICIJ, while we see a clip of Gunnlaugsson storming out of an interview in which his financial dealings were questioned. 

On the night of publication on 3 April 2016, there was a degree of trepidation because Edward Snowden had leaked that an enormous report was in the offing, while the wife of the Icelandic prime minister had taken to Facebook to discredit it. When the lid blew, however, media outlets around the world ran the story and there was no hiding place for any of the big names caught up in the scandal. Mossack Fonseca founders Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca went on the defensive, claiming that the press had gone after the company that produced the knives rather than the crooks that wielded them. But the public outrage was palpable and following Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson's resignation, Nawaz Sharif and Brazil's Dilma Rousseff were removed from office. 

Garside, Harding and Johnson also suggest that the pro-Brexit press used the Panama Papers to discredit David Cameron as he was fronting the Remain campaign in the 2016 Referendum and, therefore, link our imminent exit from the EU to the Panama Papers revelations. However, Daphne Caruana Galizia and Russian Roman Anin were among many who were threatened, while Rita Vásquez recalls being accused of treason. But, while the report was awarded the Pulitzer Prize on 10 April 2017, Caruana Galizia was killed in a car bomb six months later and her son accused the island of being in the hands of a mafia. Although arrests were made, Times of Malta reporter Jacob Borg notes that those who gave the orders for the execution remain at large.

In Panama, Mossack and Fonseca were charged with money laundering, but Attorney General Kenia Porcell admits that it's a difficult case because powerful forces are hindering its conduct. But those involved in the ICIJ story are still ploughing through the files in the hope of adding to the list of casualties given in a closing caption. However, the documentary rather peters out, as Winter seeks to reaffirm the value of investigative journalism at a time when a growing number of people are taking their news from unreliable sources online. 

Indeed, the film seems less concerned with condemning the culture that has allowed the 1% tighten its grip on the planet than on promoting the Fourth Estate in the face of Trump's demonisation it as the purveyor of what he insists is `fake news'. As a celebration of free speech and the courage it sometimes takes to uphold it, it's highly laudable and timely. Moreover, it resists the temptation to try and identify John Doe or speculate on how he or she came by the cache. But anyone one who followed the Panama Papers story when it broke will find few fresh revelations about the Mossack Fonseca methodology or the identities of those involved. Thus, while it boasts the presence of Laura Poitras among the producers, it lacks the gut-punch potency of her Oscar-winning Edward Snowden profile, Citizenfour (2014). Nevertheless, Winter lays out his facts clearly and convincingly and he is ably abetted in this regard by editor Weston Cadwell.

Nothing focuses the mind quite like a documentary that reminds us of the fragility of life and the sobering realisation that we shall all be utterly alone at the moment of our death. But, even though much of its action is set at the bottom of the North Sea, it's not all gloom and doom in Alex Parkinson and Richard Da Costa's Last Breath. Indeed, that's part of the problem, as the debuting duo want their account of a 2012 diving emergency to be as tense as thrillers like Erik Skjoldbjærg's Pioneer (2013) and Ben Parker's The Chamber (2016). However, by opting to utilise talking heads, archive footage and meticulous reconstructions, the pair struggle to sustain their arch conceit before the big reveal that won't come as a surprise to anyone with the slightest interest in the subject or a search engine on their computer, phone or tablet. Thus, while this is every bit as sincere as Anthony Wonke's Piper Alpha memoir, Fire in the Night (2013), it's never as gripping or hard-hitting.

On 18 September 2012, the Dive Support Vessel Topaz set sail from Aberdeen with a crew of 127, including 12 saturation divers due to carry out investigation and repair work on some oil rigs in the North Sea. As Chris Lemons takes his camera on a tour of the craft and shows off the sauna and sunbed, fiancée Morag Martin, who is the head of the local primary school, reveals that they were building a house together at the time Lemons set out on what should have been a routine mission. 

So that its divers can be ready to go when called upon, Topaz is built around a pressurised saturation system that is made up of living chambers that remain onboard the vessel and bells that transfer the divers to the seabed. In order to work at such depths, the divers have to be locked inside the system and this process is called `doing sat'. On this trip, Lemons was with paired with Dave Yuasa and Duncan Allcock, with the former being known as a bit of a Vulcan and the latter being regarded as an all-round good egg who had worked with Lemons before. 

At the end of his guided tour, Lemons films the cramped living quarters and the tunnels through which crewmates have to crawl in order to get to the bathroom and the sleeping spaces. During a 28-day mission, the divers will live at ten times atmospheric pressure and the saturation system will be their home. As Yuasa and Allcock recall, Lemons was a bit twitchy while going through the `blowdown' process that acclimatises the capsule to the pressures on the seabed, as he was still new to the job and wanted to make a good impression. However, he had reassured Morag that everything was fine and, as a result, she never worried about him going away.

Around 125 miles from Aberdeen, the waters can be choppy and there is always a risk when the crew goes into dynamic positioning, which sees a computer lock the vessel over an exact point on the seabed. Diving supervisor Craig Frederick explains that he has complete control of a mission once divers are in the water. Allcock was bellman on the night in question, with Yuasa being Diver One and Lemons being Diver Two. We see them climbing into the bell and being lowered into the sea. Allcock explains that a diver is entirely reliant on his umbilical once they are in the water, as it provides hot water to keep up their body temperature, air to breath and a communication link. 

Yuasa admits to enjoying jumping off the bell, as he likes the feeling of weightlessness, but he concedes that it's tricky getting used to being on the seabed, as it's very dark and can be extremely disorientating and stressful. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to return to the bell at any time by following the umbilical, while their progress is always being monitored on the surface. Allcock confides that he knew he wanted to dive for a living after seeing Jacques Cousteau on the telly and notes that the bellmen can relax a bit once their divers have reached their work station. 

On this job, Lemons and Yuasa were to descend to a manifold containing various oil pipes and replace a length of piping. Frederick remembers there being an 18ft swell and winds blowing at 35 knots, but he didn't believe that the conditions were undiveable. Dynamic Positioning Officer Michal Cichorski notes that divers can never be wholly safe and admits to being taken aback when the DP system suddenly started showing alarm warnings. So, when an amber situation turned red in a very short space of time, Frederick had no hesitation in ordering Yuasa and Lemons back to the bell. 

Up top, the crew started to lose control because of the system failure and the bell shifted position beneath the drifting ship. Yuasa realised it was now behind him and that he had to climb the manifold in order to get to safety. But, while he got clear, Lemons discovered that his umbilical was stuck. Moreover, the drifting vessel was pulling it increasingly taut and he was unable to secure the slack he needed to free himself. Yuasa went back to help, but was at the end of his own umbilical and couldn't reach him, even though they were only 2m apart. He could hear the cord beginning to stretch and suddenly Lemons's screen went black in the control room, as contact was lost. 

On the bell, Allcock wound in Lemons's hot water and gas lines and remembers turning them off with a heavy heart. As Yuasa made it back to the platform below the bell, he realised that Lemons had few options because he has been cut free and that the bale out bottle on his back had only five minutes of oxygen to help him get back to the bell when he wouldn't have a clue where it was in the darkness. 

As the crisis unfolded, Stuart Anderson, who was in another system, was told to prepare his medical equipment. Both Frederick and Chichowski reveal that the skipper had switched to a manual system of steering that was only normally used in harbour and was pretty powerless against the conditions. As he tried to steer, the craft was being buffeted by the wind and waves and moving further away from the bell site. 

In a bid to locate the manifold, Frederick sent a Remotely Operated Vehicle into the water, which he could operate using a joystick (which was not, presumably, on the outed computer system). After an agonising wait, he spotted it and saw Lemons lying on its upper grille and clearly moving. Over 20 minutes had passed since the umbilical had been severed, but the tank was only supposed to keep him going for five minutes. All agree that Lemons's fortitude was quite remarkable. But, as Topaz was still drifting, no one could reach him and, eventually, his body movements ceased. 

On the bell, Yuasa admits that he felt little emotion, as accidents happen and it wasn't as if Lemons was a best mate or one of his three kids. He had just been unlucky on the job. By contrast, despite not being religious, Allcock kept praying and his entreaties seemed to have been answered when a last resort reboot of the computer software worked and the system kicked back in, enabling the crew to regain control of the ship and begin steaming back to the dive site. 

Once there, Yuasa had no hesitation in diving down to recover what he thought would be a dead body. He didn't think of Lemons as a human being, but an object that had to be recovered and he recalls how heavy he felt when he tried to ascend. But he completed the mission and reached the bell 38 minutes after the umbilical had snapped. Allcock twice gave Lemons the kiss of life and hoped with all his might. 

At this juncture, the screen fades to black before Lemons walks into shot to be made-up for his interview. In voiceover, he declares that he often thinks back to what happened that night and still struggles to convey what he went through. On screen, the countdown clock that has accompanied the rescue footage goes into reverse and we hear the story from the survivor's perspective. 

Lemons recalls hearing a loud bang before he started falling towards the seabed in ethereal silence. As it was dark, he didn't know where he was and, in his panic, he lucked out in choosing which direction to take, as he soon reached the manifold. He climbed to the top and was fully aware of the gas he had used and knew that the odds were stacking against him. Consequently, he came to terms with the fact that he probably wasn't going to make it. 

He doesn't recall feeling cold, but did have thoughts of letting Morag down and missing out on their wedding day and seeing their house complete. In order to approximate these visions, we cut away rather clumsily to blurry home movies of Lemons playing with some kids and Morag smiling at him. He also remembers feeling alone and being aware that he was almost inevitably facing the end. 

Here, we cut back to Lemons coming around and seeing lights and looking up into Allcock's friendly face. Yuasa admits to being cross with him, as one would be with a child that got lost, and recalls feeling exhausted in the shower. But he insists that he wasn't a hero, as he was only doing his job and Frederick concurs that he and his shipmates simply did what they were paid for. By comparison, Anderson gets emotional when he remembers Lemons telling him that reconciling oneself to the feeling that you are going to die isn't as awful as one might have imagined. 

In summation, Lemons has no idea how he survived, but knows he will remain indebted to the entire Topaz crew. Morag recalls how shaken she was when he called to tell her what had happened. But they married soon afterwards and, in his speech Lemons had joked about Allcock being a good kisser. Three weeks after the incident, the trio went down again and Frederick told him in no uncertain terms not to eff up this time. 

It has long been a bugbear of this column that it is becoming increasingly difficult to gauge with any confidence while watching a documentary whether one is looking at authentic or reconstructed footage. Given the nature of this narrative, it's exceedingly frustrating to be kept literally and figuratively in the dark when it comes to the underwater imagery. One has to presume that much of it has been replicated because the systems that would have operated any cameras would have packed in. In that case, one can only commend the efforts in achieving such avant-gardish approximations of cinematographer Alistair McCormick, underwater cameraman Eric Börgesson, production designer Moley Campbell and editor Sam Rogers. 

Composer Paul Leonard-Morgan and sound designer Ben Baird also make invaluable contributions, while the members of the Topaz crew also do their bit to help Parkinson and Da Costa build and sustain suspense. But the co-directors seem weighed down by their tagline - `It is Gravity meets Touching the Void - 100 metres underwater' - as they seem more intent on keeping the audience on the edge of their seats that they are in exploring the themes thrown up by Lemons's brush with the beyond. To their credit, however, they have stuck to the facts and not attempted any facile speculations about how Lemons lived to dive another die. Moreover, they have also thrown down the gauntlet to commercial diving outfits to reassess their operating procedures and this can only be a good thing.