The Mission review – a surgeon saves lives in war-torn Gaza in a visceral portrait of human endurance

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Mohammad Tahir and his colleagues operate through bombing and blackouts in barely functional hospitals – but there are moments of relief amid the documentary’s tragedy and gore What this documentary might lack in film-making finesse it makes up for with sheer visceral and emotional impact. British nerve surgeon Mohammad Tahir and his colleagues, who also work the cameras, toil in Gaza’s barely operational hospitals during some of the worst days and nights of the war in the winter of 2024-25. Supported by US-based charity FAJR Global , who provide medical care to the world’s most in need, Tahir operates through bombings and blackouts with a bare minimum of medical supplies, sometimes treating patients lying on the floor in puddles of blood because there are no gurneys. This is often hard to watch, and not just because of all the gore; many of the victims are children, out of whom Tahir and the others dig bullets as well as tiny tungsten cubes, new-fangled shrapnel designed to cause maxi...
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Rome, Open City review – Rossellini’s blazingly urgent masterpiece from a city in ruins

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Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 neorealist drama is unsparing in its depiction of the heavy price of both resistance and collaboration with the Nazi occupation

Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 film is a blazingly urgent and painful bulletin from the frontline of Italy’s historical agony: the Axis power that had belatedly turned against the Mussolini fascists only to be humiliatingly occupied by Nazi Germany on whose orders the dictator was reinstalled in the northern Salò puppet state, resplendent in contemptible impotence and pathos, with Rome at its defeated and compromised centre. It was a film that used the so-recently-devastated real streets and people of Rome on location for a project on which Rossellini started script work well before the end of the war, building on ideas by screenwriter Sergio Amidei with dialogue contribution by the young Federico Fellini.

Rome, Open City is revived as part of the BFI Southbank’s Chasing the Real season of Italian neorealism, along with the two other movies from his “war” trilogy: the episodic portmanteau film Paisà (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948). This is the first time I have revisited the film since its rerelease 10 years ago, when the locations seemed as vivid and compelling as the Vienna of Carol Reed’s The Third Man or the (fabricated) Casablanca in Michael Curtiz’s Hollywood classic. Rome was “open” in the sense that that the Allies had agreed not to bomb it in deference to its historic and architectural importance and in return for the Italian authorities’ undertaking not to defend it militarily. In fact, Rome had been bombed before its “open” status was agreed on; one figure asks Anna Magnani’s character here if the Americans really exist, and she shruggingly gestures at the (genuine) bomb damage and says: “Looks like it.”

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