Tag: family history

Categories
Animation Dance Features Movies

Ana, en Passant
(Ana, en Passant)

Ana, en Passant (Ana, en Passant)

Director – Fernanda Salgado – 2026 – Brazil, Portugal, France – Cert. tbc – 90m

*****

A woman from Paris travels to Belo Horizonte, Brazil where she hopes to unearth something of her family history – from the BFI London Film Festival 2026 which runs from Wednesday, October 7th to Sunday, October 18th in cinemas and on BFI Player

This opens with a profusion of images and a child’s voice asking: “mummy, what is a map?” The images are moving images treated in painterly ways, animated postcard-like holiday snaps putting themselves into order, flashes of memory as if printed on an unusual under-texture. Then an image of a baby scanned in the womb. More images – fish in the ocean, talk by the little girl of whether fish follow maps too – then we settle into the film proper.

Which is to say that, rather than the film’s form constantly shifting, it suddenly settles into a more formal, less abstract, fixed form of 2D animation as Ana (voice: Jéssica Pierina) – the little girl asking the questions earlier, perhaps? – leaves the Paris Metro with its familiar Hector Guimard art deco, wrought iron entrance, wanders satisfyingly along the bank of the Seine and finally enters her apartment, where she tidies broken pieces of china off the floor, binning them.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Palimpsest
The story of a name
(隱蹟之書：重寫自我)

Palimpsest: The story of a name (隱蹟之書：重寫自我)

Director – Mary Stephen – 2025 – France – Cert. – 108m

*****

Exploring her family history, Hong Kong-born Mary Stephen delves into the mystery behind her surname being British rather than Chinese – plays at the Barbican as is the opening film of the UK’s Hong Kong Film Festival which runs from Friday, September 25th to Sunday, 4th October at various venues

The director narrates her film in the first person, talking about the fact of her father’s name being Henry Stephen on his birth certificate, while her mother retained her Chinese name on the document. Mary Stephen herself was born in Hong Kong in 1953, the same year as Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in Britain. Archive images of Hong Kong from that year show a strange dislocation, with images of the new English monarch jostling side by side with Chinese words on buildings. A British built clock tower looks strangely out of place.

She worked for years with celebrated New Wave director Eric Rohmer as his editor. His name, too, was a palimpsest.

Her father died and was buried in Canada in 1979, alongside her mother. When the family first moved there, she was a teenager.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

A Pale View of Hills
(Toi Yamanamino Hikari,
遠い山なみの光)

A Pale View of Hills (Toi Yamanamino Hikari, 遠い山なみの光)

Director – Kei Ishikawa – 2025 – UK, Japan, Poland – Cert. 12a – 123m

From the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro

***1/2

An aspiring journalist in 1982 England delves into her mother’s past life in 1952 Nagasaki and unearths dark family secrets – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 13th

As will be seen from the above logline description, this essentially plays out in two timelines.

One is in Nagasaki, Japan in 1952, less than a decade after the dropping of the atomic bomb, where the married and barely visibly pregnant Etsuko (Suzo Hirose from Lupin III the First, Takashi Yamazaki, 2019; The Third Murder, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2017; The Boy and the Beast, Mamoru Hosoda, 2015; Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015) befriends Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido from River’s Edge, Isao Yukisada, 2018; Himizu, Sion Sono, 2011), the mother of local waif Mariko (Mio Suzuki), who lives in an isolated shack near the river and plans to emigrate to the US with a man named ‘Frank’.

The other is in a town in England somewhere near Greenham Common, Berkshire, in 1982, where aspiring journalist Niki (Camilla Aiko from Dr.… Read the rest