My Memory Is Full of Ghosts review – deeply moving visual hymn for the bombed-out Syrian city of Homs

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Anas Zawahri’s documentary lays heart-wrenching testimony over languorous shots of bullet-ridden ruins and deserted streets The western Syrian city of Homs is only a husk of its former self. Previously a major industrial centre, the region became a key battleground between 2011 and 2014, for Bashar al-Assad’s army and rebel forces. Amid the immense bloodshed, hundreds of thousands of civilians were either displaced or trapped inside their own homes. Filmed in the summer of 2023, this deeply moving documentary from Palestinian-born and Syria-based film-maker Anas Zawahri maps out the collective trauma and sorrow that continue to linger, even after the shooting has stopped. Unfolding in languorous, largely static shots of bombed rubble, hollowed-out buildings, and deserted streets, the film lays bare the startling extent of wartime brutality. A sense of stillness and stagnancy hangs in the air, and almost every wall is riddled with bullet holes, urban scars that mirror the psychological ...
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Àma Gloria review – amazing performances in sensitive drama about a kid and her nanny

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Six year old Louise Mauroy-Panzani is wonderful as Cléo, strongly bonded to her carer Gloria, who has to leave her

By rights Louise Mauroy-Panzani should be at the front of the queue for every acting award going for her role in this gorgeous French drama. Just six years old at the time of filming (the casting director spotted her in Paris arguing with her brother in the street), she gives a performance so open and natural, it has an almost transparent quality. You feel what her character Cléo feels as her world is turned upside down over one summer. Equally brilliant is another first-time actor, Ilça Moreno Zego, a real-life nanny playing Gloria, who has taken care of Cléo since she was tiny and is now moving back to Cape Verde.

The opening scenes showing us Cléo’s life with Gloria are beautifully detailed. Cléo’s mum died when she was a baby, and she lives with her dad (Arnaud Rebotini), who is gentle but remote, still reeling from grief. It’s Gloria who is the sun in Cleo’s life. Running out of school her little face, poking out from under a tangled mop of curls, lights up at the sight of her nanny. Then, one day, Gloria gets a call. Her mother in Cape Verde has died; she is going home to look after her own children.

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