Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 21/2/2013)

Now, however, it provides the backdrop for Lore, the second feature by Australian Cate Shortland that comes eight years after her notable 2004 debut, Somersault. Adapted from one of the three self-contained stories contained in Rachel Seiffert's 2001 Booker Prize-nominated novel, The Dark Room, this is a compelling study of the effect of 12 years of totalitarianism on an acquiescent nation. But it is also a disconcerting rite of teenage passage, as its eponymous heroine learns to think for herself and realises the extent of the lies she has been told by the leaders and parents she had trusted so implicitly.

As previously unthinkable defeat becomes an inevitability, SS officer Hans-Jochen Wagner returns to his Black Forest home to burn incriminating documents, shoot the family dog and bundle wife Ursina Lardi, their five children and a few vital belongings into a truck bound for their country retreat. A fervent Nazi, Lardi can barely look at the husband she considers a coward as he returns to certain death at the hands of the Red Army. But she realises once Hitler commits suicide that her own slender chances of survival depend on surrendering to the Allies and taking whatever punishment awaits her in an internment camp. Thus, she entrusts her valuables to 14 year-old Saskia Rosendahl and instructs her to use them in order to deliver younger sister Nele Trebs, twins Mika Seidel and André Frid and baby Nick Leander Holaschke to their grandmother in Hamburg, some 500 miles to the north.

Having enjoyed a life of sheltered indoctrination, Rosendahl is used to getting her own way and is surprised that farmer Sven Pippig and his wife Katrin Pollitt are so reluctant to give them food. But when Frid is caught stealing, she knows that the time has come to move on and convinces her siblings that their parents will be waiting for them at the end of their journey. However, she is dismayed to learn from an elderly refugee couple that the trains have been stopped and that they will have to proceed across country on foot. It comes as something of a relief, therefore, when she finds an abandoned house and the boys enjoy themselves smashing windows while Rosendahl looks for something to eat. All she finds, however, is the body of a rape victim and a frightened boy in an upstairs room and she ushers the children away to protect them from the grim realities of conquest.

Arriving at a nearby village, Rosendahl uses a piece of her mother's jewellery to coax a stranger into breast-feeding the baby and she joins the queue for bread that has formed alongside noticeboards showing graphic evidence of the Holocaust. Her fingers get sticky with the glue used to post the pictures and she returns to look at them again after dark and tears off a portion that seems to contain an image of her father in his uniform. She is watched from across the square by a young man dressed in black (Kai Malina), but hurries away when he approaches her and makes an early start next morning so she can escape his piercing gaze.

Eventually, the family reaches a rundown farm, where everybody gets paraffin on their hands from a leaky container in the courtyard. Rosendahl ventures inside and encounters an old woman (Friedriche Frerichs), who says she can only offer them water, as she has nothing else left. Rosendahl gives her Lardi's wedding ring in order to buy food and Trebs criticises her for giving away something so precious for such meagre return. But Rosendahl steals a watch from the corpse of Frerichs's husband, who had shot himself in the head in the barn, and returns to the house to find Seidel and Frid singing a military song for the tearful Frerichs, who begs a portrait of the Führer to forgive the country for failing to realise his ambitions.

Once again sensing danger, Rosendahl makes a hasty exit and settles her siblings to sleep in the woods. As she tries to quieten the baby, she bumps into Malina, who follows at a short distance when they return to the road in the morning. When they are stopped by an American patrol, however, Malina claims to be the children's brother and they are given a lift in the back of a truck. But, while Rosendahl is grateful for the intervention (as she has no papers or travel permits), she is stung by the sight of a yellow star in Malina's wallet and has to fight the anti-Semitism she has been taught because she knows he could be a valuable protector. Yet, when he offers them food in a bombed-out munitions factory hidden in the depths of the forest, she warns him to keep his distance and refrain from touching their provisions.

She continues to regard him with suspicion as he plays with the twins in a nearby river. But, while her prejudices remain intact, she has come to realise that the family's past threatens its future. Thus, when Frid proudly shows Malina a photograph of his father, she buries it in the undergrowth along with the scrap that she had torn from the bulletin board. Moreover, she also demonstrates her growing maturity and resourcefulness by letting Malina put his hand up her dress, as she knows he is more likely to stay with them if she appears available to him.

Yet Rosendahl cannot stop herself from slapping and insulting him as she pulls away and he remains confused by her mixed signals as they reach a lake and she tries to use her naive wiles to coax eel fisherman Jan Peter Heyne into rowing them to the other side. Getting nowhere with coquettish smiles and an awkward attempt at a dance, Rosendahl starts to undo the buttons of her dress and she pulls the older man close to her so that he doesn't hear Malina creeping up on him to cave in his skull with a stone. Suddenly bound together in a pitiless crime, the pair exchange anxious glances before loading the others into the boat. Appalled by her deed, Rosendahl plunges into the water with the infant in her arms. But Malina jumps in to haul her to the bank and reassures Trebs, Seidel and Frid that she had not meant to harm their brother.

As they reach the demarcation line between the American and British zones, Malina has to stop the guilt-stricken Rosendahl from confessing to a soldier. However, in trying to pass around the frontier without the necessary documents, they stray into the Russian sector and Frid is gunned down when he rushes to greet Malina in the hope he has brought back some food from a recce. They are forced to leave him dead in the dust as they flee for their own lives into British territory.

As they camp for the night, Malina tells Rosendahl that they will now be safe, as the trains have started running again and they should be able to reach the coast without hindrance. However, she pleads with him not to abandon them and tries to hug him in the hope of arousing his pity. Against his better judgement, he joins them on the train and has to listen to the passengers claiming that the evidence of the Final Solution has been fabricated by the Americans and Rosendahl almost tries to apologise with her eyes as she sees him struggling to keep his emotions in check. But she is forced to remain equally silent when British troops board the train and Malina discovers that his wallet has been stolen. Keen not to drag Rosendahl into his predicament, he slips off the train and her face remains impassive at the window as he disappears along the platform.

Arriving in Hamburg, the children are transported across the muddy marshland by horse and cart. Seidel reaches into his pocket and produces Malina's wallet and tries to explain that he had taken it to ensure he couldn't leave them. He remarks that Malina looks nothing like the photograph on the identity card and Rosendahl is suddenly confronted with the prospect that, instead of being Jewish, Malina may well have been a Nazi using purloined papers to prevent his arrest. Yet, she is touched to see the snapshots tucked inside the wallet and reassures Seidel that he had acted out of the best intentions, even though she is nettled by his careless remark that he is glad such a decent fellow wasn't a dirty Jew.

Grandmother Eva-Maria Hagen barely recognises the children as she welcomes them to her remote farmhouse. Rosendahl breaks the news about Frid and is accused of lying by Trebs when it becomes clear that they will not be joined by their parents. Hagen stops them squabbling and insists neither Wagner not Lardi have done anything wrong and that they should never be ashamed of them. The quarrel is soon forgotten, however, as Rosendahl, Trebs and Seidel share a bath and laugh as the latter makes bubbles in the water.

However, Rosendahl has been changed forever by what she has seen and done, with the bruises on her legs matching the scars on her psyche. She wakes next morning in a warm bed and clean night-dress and puts the porcelain deer that Lardi had always treasured with the other animals on her childhood dressing-table. However, she is too sad to join Trebs and maid Antonia Holfelder in a dance in the kitchen and climbs a tree in the garden to look at the photos in Malina's wallet. Although uncertain whether they genuinely come from his past, she has learnt enough to know that they represent lives that have been shattered by the ideology espoused by her parents and still cherished by too many of the people she has encountered on her odyssey. Thus, when Hagen criticises Seidel for his table manners, Rosendahl misbehaves in solidarity and is sent to her room, where she smashes the figurines to symbolise both the end of her innocence and her rejection of everything she had accepted so unquestioningly under the Third Reich as the truth.

An exceptional performance by Saskia Rosendahl dominates this morally opaque saga, which daringly highlights the impenitence and intransigence of many Germans as the full extent of Nazi criminality became apparent. For much of the journey, Rosendahl adheres to her parents' teaching and it is only pragmatism that prompts her to accept assistance from fellow Aryans, let alone Kia Malina's Jewish vagabond. However, unlike her siblings, she comes to understand the realities of bigoted tyranny and, even though she still has much to learn, she gradually comes of age during her ordeal.

The climactic doubt raised about Malina's identity means that he becomes equally difficult to read. His watchful taciturnity would be authentic if he was either a Jew reacclimatising to freedom or a soldier trying to evade capture. Yet, while he seems remarkably sturdy for a camp inmate, surely someone examining his papers would have noticed any discrepancies between his facial features and his photograph. Whatever his origins or motives, he proves a dependable companion, whose canniness and ingenuity delivers the travellers from several scrapes. Consequently, one is much less concerned about the fate of this born survivor than one is about Rosendahl, who has all the makings of a 1960s radical activist..

Adapting in collaboration with Robin Mukherjee, Shortland has produced a cogent and plausible narrative that occasionally recalls André Téchiné's Strayed (2003), which sees Gaspard Ulliel guide Parisian Emmanuelle Béart and her two young children across occupied France. The storyline is necessarily episodic and few of the passing characters are developed in any depth. Even Rosendahl's siblings sometime feel like plot devices. But the overall ambience and the central ambiguity are ably maintained, thanks to the excellence of cinematographer Adam Arkapaw's controlled use of light and colour, the credible simplicity of Silke Fischer's production design and the unsettling intensity of Sam Petty's sound mix. We can only hope, therefore, that we don't have to wait another eight years for Shortland's next offering.

Although several Bollywood pictures are released in the UK each year, review access to them is disappointingly limited. However, the occasional indie picture manages to break out from the festival circuit and make it on to the schedule and few in recent times have arrived with as much fanfare as Anurag Kashyap's 317-minute crime epic, Gangs of Wasseypur. Chronicling the period 1941-90, the first part reaches cinemas this week, with the second instalment due in early March. Already compared in some quarters to Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972-74), this ambitious enterprise is actually closer in tone to a couple of French two-parters, Jean-François Richet's Mesrine (2008) and Olivier Assayas's Carlos (2010), as it is also based on actual events and adopts the same kinetic approach to both structure and character. What remains to be seen, however, is whether this slick, complex and combustible saga will have the same arthouse appeal.

Flashing back from a nocturnal raid whose significance will only become apparent in Part Two, the action opens in 1941, as Sunni Muslim bandit Shahid Khan (Jaideep Ahlawat) begins robbing trains to feed his neighbours in the coal-producing village of Wasseypur in the northern Indian region of Jharkhand. The grain he purloins belongs to Sutana Daku Qureshi (Pramod Pathak), whose thirst for vengeance prompts Shahid to seek sanctuary in the nearby town of Dhanbad, where he is working as a miner when his wife dies in giving birth to his son, Sardar. Grief-stricken, Shahid leaves the boy in the care of his uncle, Nasir (Piyush Mishra), while he rises through the ranks after the wealthy Ramadhir Singh (Tigmanshu Dhulia) takes control of the mine during the post-Independence sell-off. But, when Ramadhir overhears Shahid promising to seize control after being ordered to burn the miners' living quarters to reduce costs, he hires Ehsaan Qureshi (Pramod Pathak) to hunt him down and Shahid is finally assassinated by shady gun runner Yadav (Harish Khanna) in the holy city of Benares.

Despite Ehsaan's assurance to the contrary, Sardar (Manoj Bajpai) is spared by the resourcefulness of Nasir and, by the time the story resumes in 1961, he and best buddy Asghar (Jameel Khan) are challenging the petrol monopoly that Ramadhir has imposed on the region with his son, JP (Satya Anand). Having exploited the unions to increase his fortune and forged a career in politics, Ramadhir is used to being obeyed and he is furious with Ehsaan for bungling his mission. However, he uses his power to imprison Sardar, who leaves wife Nagma Khatoon (Richa Chadda) to raise their sons, Danish (Shubhain) and Faizal (Utkarsh).

In 1979, Dinesh smuggles bomb-making equipment into the jail inside a lunch pail and, while the guards are distracted by the inmates performing a Bollywood masala, Sardar blasts his way to freedom. However, he is unable to rejoin his family and, while lying low in a seedy district, he embarks upon an affair with Bengali serving girl Durga (Reema Sen). Nasir and Asghar break the news to Nagma, who is heartbroken and Faizal is dismayed by the consolation she draws from Nasir. But he is also angry with his father, who becomes a vigilante when community leader Qamar Maqdoomi (Sanjeeva Vats) asks him to stop the Qureshis from raping non-clan women. However, when the wrestler who acts as his bodyguard is killed in reprisal, butcher Sultan Qureshi (Pankaj Tripathi) defies the Singhs by refusing to press charges because he wants to exact revenge in his own good time.

As the years pass, Wasseypur is swallowed up by the sprawling metropolis of Dhanbad and Sardar finds himself with a woman and an enemy in each place. However, as the police are too scared to venture into Wasseypur, this becomes the base of his operations, as he launches a series of pitiless assaults on the Qureshis. He also becomes a father again, as Nagma and Durga respectively give birth to sons named Perpendicular and Definite. But he neglects Danish and Faizal, who have to take jobs cleaning train toilets until Ramadhir gives them a handout, in the hope of earning their trust. Faizal is further conflicted when he catches Nagma and Nasir in a compromising situation and he becomes something of a wild child, as he hangs out with street gangs and starts experimenting with drugs.

The simmering tensions between the Khans, Qureshis and Singhs finally erupt in 1985, when some of the latter's supporters kidnap a young girl and Sardar's retribution is so brutal that Ramadhir and Sultan forge an alliance. But Sardar goes from strength to strength and, by 1990, he not only has a contract to fill in the old mines around Wasseypur, but he has also gone into the scrap metal business with Danish and Ashgar and bought a lake so that he can start extorting money from the local fishermen. When Danish is shot and wounded, Sardar decides to unite his households and Durga is slapped when she tries to stand up to him.

This insult rankles with both mother and son, although Faizal is forced to cool his heels for a spell after he is arrested while collecting a consignment of illegal pistols from Yadav. On his release, Faizal takes a shine to the flighty Mohsina (Huma Qureshi), while Danish falls for Sultan's sister, Shama Parveen (Anurita Jha). Sardar is in favour of the union, as he hopes it can bring about a ceasefire. But Sultan is dead set against it and so, when Faizal returns from murdering Yadav, he conspires with him to isolate Sardar at a petrol station en route to the fishing lake and he is riddled with bullets as Part One draws to a close.

Audaciously blending Hollywood and Bollywood elements, Anurag Kashyap is splendidly served here by an excellent ensemble and the polished contributions of cinematographer Rajeev Ravi, production designer Wasiq Khan and composer Sneha Khanwalkar, whose score is knowingly dotted with filmi classics which not only help establish the time in which a scene takes place, but also often provide ironic counterpoints to its tone. The scenario may be a little busy in places, while Kashyap can never resist the odd socio-political digression or song-and-dance routine. But he interweaves the multiple plot strands with considerable skill, while also staging several violent set-pieces, which have been dynamically edited by Shweta Venkat Matthew without resort to the frantic flash-cutting that is so much in vogue in American and Hong Kong actioners.

Kashyap has always been something of a controversial figure. His debut, Paanch (2003), was twice turned down by the censors, while Black Friday (2004), his account of the 1993 Mumbai bombings, caused a stir on both sides of the politico-religious divide. He then incurred further ire by co-scripting Water (2005), Deepa Mehta's Oscar-nominated denunciation of the ashram system, since when he has produced many less accomplished screenplays for the Bollywood mainstream and bolstered his directorial credentials with No Smoking (2007), Dev D, Gulaal (both 2009) and the admired, but decidedly wayward, The Girl in Yellow Boots (2010). He had explored the underworld before, with the script he co-wrote with Saurabh Shukla for Ram Gopal's Satya (1998), but this five-hour extravaganza is undoubtedly his masterpiece to date.

The shifting dramatis personnae and endless convolutions demand audience attention, although the repetitiveness that creepingly enervates Part Two begins to creep into towards the explosive finale. Nevertheless, Kashyap finds room for plenty of hard-boiled humour and countless cultural references that will doubtless be highly (and often slyly) significant to subcontinental connoisseurs, yet which still convey the grip that Bollywood has on the national imagination. This self-reflexivity pitches the picture closer to Tarantino than Coppola, but it's the willingness to exploit and subvert Bollywood convention that makes this such a landmark in Indian indie cinema.

German director Jan Schmidt-Garre visits a very different India in Breath of the Gods, as he investigates the origins of yoga and assesses the part played in its global dissemination during the mid-20th century by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. This is a tricky film to analyse, as one suspects that aficionados will already be familiar with much of the material, while so few concessions are made to those encountering it for the first time that it is difficult to see what even the most ardent seeker of truth and enlightenment will glean from it. There is no doubting the sincerity of the director and the various devotees he interviews. But, such is the insularity of his approach to such a specialised subject, that it has a tendency to frustrate rather than fascinate.

Although many believe that yoga was the gift of Shiva, who fashioned over eight million positions, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (who was born in the village of Muchukunte in 1888) always cited an ancient text known as the Yoga Korunta as the source of the exercises that he is seen performing in flickering black-and-white archival footage. However, as the manuscript was supposedly written on palm leaves that were devoured by ants, it is more likely that Krishnamacharya was inspired by a combination of oral and practical traditions that had been preserved by generations of Buddhist monks. In order to get to the bottom of the mystery, Schmidt-Garre meets up with Norwegian acolyte Alexander Medin, who introduces him to K. Pattabhi Jois, one of Krishnamacharya's few remaining students, who puts the novice through his paces and urges him to devote daily time to practice.

Jois readily accepts the Yoga Korunta legend. But contemporary BKS Iyengar recalls things very differently when Schmidt-Garre travels to Pune, as he thinks that Krishnamacharya reworked modern techniques into a style that suited him and which he could easily teach to his disciples. Iyengar recalls that people regarded yoga with deep suspicion in the 1930s and that it was only when Krishnamacharya earned the patronage of Maharaja Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV that it began to be taken seriously.

Schmidt-Garre goes to Mysore to see the Jaganmohan Palace where Krishnamacharya founded his yogashala. He is joined at what is now a Roman Catholic school by Jois and his former pupil Srinavasa Sharma and they wander around the grounds reminiscing about the old days before Schmidt-Garre mounts a monochrome reconstruction of a command performance before the court in the shadow of the majestic white summer palace. He also meets up with Krishnamacharya's son TK Sribhashyam, who explains how his father took   asanas from a range of texts to devise the so-called Vinyasa Krama method that would enable the male members of the royal family to be as supple as their battle-ready soldiers.

Following contrasting footage of Krishnamacharya and his modern-day adherents, Schmidt-Garre meet his daughters, Pundarikavalli and Alamelu, and shows clips of them exercising with their father as young girls. Pundarikavalli muses on how he used to divide his day to explore the physical and the philosophical sides of yoga, while Alamelu remembers him being a strict taskmaster who set great store by concentration. But, during the course of his visit to Bangalore, Schmidt-Garre unearths another possible source of Krishnamacharya's epiphany when he is told that he learned much from a hermit in the Himalayas.

Undaunted by the mounting contradictions, Schmidt-Garre accompanies Sribhashyam to the college where he used to teach with his father and he reveals that yoga was considered an elitist pastime before he brought it to the masses. Moreover, he also encouraged women like his wife Namagiri and daughter Shuba to hone their techniques and we see the latter doing a routine (complete with a series of rolled-tongue inhalations) that she has been doing every day for 75 years. Yet, even though he allows the camera to linger on this regimen and shows young and old alike working in the studio, Schmidt-Garre makes no attempt to identify or explain the exercises and, thus, fritters any educational potential that his documentary might have possessed.

While Krishnamacharya was widely revered, not all of his followers remained loyal. Iyengar, for example, fell out with his brother-in-law over his refusal to provide practical assistance on how to do the splits and he relocated to Pune after tearing a hamstring so badly that it took two years to heal. In retrospect, Iyengar would have liked to remain in the guru's orbit, but has no regrets about striking out on his own, as his friendship with violinist Yehudi Menhuin helped spread the popularity of yoga pread worldwide. Ironically, as Schmidt-Garre discovers when he asks for advice on doing a headstand, Iyengar proves a stern teacher himself. But he also demonstrates a sense of humour in suggesting that because his technique involves the skin, as well as every bone and sinew, it is `wholistic' as well as holistic.

While returning to Mysore, Schmidt-Garre learns that Jois has died. He is also told by Sribhashyam how his father struggled after Independence in 1947, as the maharaja's son could no longer afford to bankroll the yogashala and he came to rely on the support of Madras newspaper magnate Shambur Prasad. Following a rather baffling meeting with an unnamed elderly student whose photograph album is filled with poses that once again are denied interpretation, Schmidt-Garre joins Sribhashyam in a Krishna temple in Chennai (the modern name for Madras) depicting Yoga Narasimha performing what is supposed to be the first asana recorded in Hindu mythology. But its relevance to the quest for the origins of Krishnamacharya's method goes unexplored.

The picture ends with Schmidt-Garre doing the `life-saving' exercises that kept Krishnamacharya alive until 1989. He concludes that it doesn't really matter where they came from; what counts is that they help bring peace of mind, spiritual awareness and the possibility of long life and, therefore, they have to be worth doing on a daily basis. Sadly, for all its lyricism, thoughtfulness and poignancy, his pilgrimage is likely to attract few converts, although it may well encourage both the lapsed to renew and the committed to redouble their own efforts.

The subcontinent also plays a crucial role in Dylan Mohan Gray's Fire in the Blood, a documentary designed to provoke outrage as it provides an unflinching tribute to the unlikely alliance of activists, doctors and high-profile champions that challenged the capitalist system and the patent laws it hides behind and forced the avaricious American pharmaceutical industry into making life-saving anti-retroviral drugs available at affordable prices to the developing world's most impoverished HIV victims. The courage, selflessness and ingenuity of the campaigners is humbling. But it's the arrogance and greed of the drug tycoons and their political lackeys that leaves the lingering impression, as they conspired to allow 10 million to perish in Africa, Asia and Latin America in the name of maximised profits.

The debuting Gray, who also serves as his own editor and narrator, opens his case by introducing doctors Peter Mugyenyi and Noor Jehan Majid, whose despair at being unable to treat patients in the Ugandan capital Kampala and the town of Machava in Mozambique came to the attention of HIV+ Cape Town judge Edwin Cameron, who felt it was unfair that he could experience the Lazarus Effect produced by ARVs when others less fortunate than himself were condemned to die. He found allies in fellow South African Zackie Achmat and Ugandan journalist Elvis Basudde Kyeyune, whose campaigns to raise awareness of the chemical apartheid being defended by Big Pharma insiders like Jan Raaijmakers of GlaxoSmithKline and Andrew S. Natsios from the United States Agency for International Development aroused the indignation of intellectual property expert James P. Love, who set out to discover how much a course of treatment actually cost and why US-based multinationals refused to reduce their prices to prevent a calamity.

Back in 2000, Achmat had tried to import a Thai generic version of Flucanazole, which cost only $1 per tablet rather than the $40 charged by Pfizer at a time when the average African weekly wage was $68. However, South African patent law meant that the cargo was contraband and it was impounded. As a consequence, Achmat announced that he would not take ARVs until everyone in the world could afford them and Nelson Mandela visited his home to salute a stance that also inspired Love, who was informed that the conglomerates refused to offer discounts to Africa in case the gesture caused the drugs to under-perform in the expanding markets of India and China.

Love was far from convinced by the arguments that scientists were afraid that people in the developing world would misuse the drugs and cause AIDS to mutate and once again become a deadly threat to affluent Westerners. Indeed, as doctors Suniti Solomon (from Kousalya) and Eric Goemaere (from Doctors Without Frontiers) point out, women like Nomvuselelo Kalolo (who is caring for her ailing daughter Lisa n Mfuleni in the Western Cape) and Chennai resident Kousalya Periasamy (who was infected after an arranged marriage with an older man) are more likely to follow instructions to the letter as they are aware the drugs offer the sole chance of survival.

However, as former Pfzer vice-president Peter Rost and New York Times business reporter Donald McNeil confirm, corporations are much more interested in making money for their stockholders than in sponsoring humanitarian programmes. Moreover, as they hold such sway in Washington, the status quo was unlikely to change, even when it attracted such notable opponents as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former president Bill Clinton. Ironically, however, it was another onetime Washington big-hitter, William F. Haddad (who had been an advisor to John F. Kennedy), who proved to be the game changer, as he not only backed Love's bid to expose the callous cynicism of Big Pharma, but he also found a willing ally in Yusuf K. Hamied, whose father had been encouraged to study pharmacology by Gandhi in the 1930s and whose Cipla company had enabled Indira Gandhi to rewrite the Indian patent laws governing medication in 1970.

In league with Haddad, Love and Denis Broun of the World Health Organisation, Hamied attended a closed-door conference of pharmaceutical giants in Brussels in the autumn of 2000 and announced that he would provide free help to any country prepared to fund its own ARV initiative. None of his competitors rallied to his call. Indeed, some leading manufacturers even started marketing cocktails of drugs in order to protect brands coming to the end of their period of patent exclusivity. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz called for such prejudicial patents to be scrapped and Donald McNeil backed his intervention by revealing that only 12% of Big Pharma's profits is invested in research, even though it receives generous funding from governments and public sources. McNeil also discovered that many companies held patents on drugs they had not invented and took out advertisements in the so-called Third World questioning the purity of generics even though their own ingredients often came from the same suppliers.

Despite the global outcry that only one in 2000 Africans could afford ARVs five years after the triple therapy breakthrough was announced in 2001, the situation remained unchanged. So, James Love urged Cipla to come up with a dollar a day regime and Hamied responded with an annual course of treatment that would cost $350 instead of the $15,000 being charged by Big Pharma. Yet, even though its rapacity had been exposed, the industry still tried to block the supply of Cipla generics and threatened to press charges against Peter Mugyenyi when he placed an order. However, he hit back by indicating that American companies had suspended patents on anti-anthrax drugs following a spate of post-9/11 attacks and he was backed by the Ugandan government, who waived patent laws to admit the delivery. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan also entered the breach by announcing the formation of the UN Global Fund to help pay for generics in the world's poorest states and even George W. Bush called for cheap ARVs in his State of the Union address on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2002.

However, Bush was soon forced to distance himself from his own policy, as ex-Eli Lilly CEO Randall Tobias was appointed AIDS czar and he ensured that the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief purchased the drugs it donated from US companies. Unsurprisingly, the budget was soon exhausted by the inflated prices and PEPFAR's self-interest was exposed when the Clinton Foundation bought Cipla generics and sparked a worldwide defiance of patent laws that saw a vast increase in the numbers being treated. Among the lucky one was bodybuilder Pradip Kumar Singh, who managed to win the Silver Medal in the Mr India pageant despite contracting HIV from shared heroin needles in the provincial town of Aurangabad. But, as Tutu Foundation medic Linda-Gail Bekker and Noerine Kaleeba from UNAIDS disclose, there were still shortages and they often had to decide who would be treated on the basis of a person's potential usefulness to their family and/or community.

Once again demonstrating a commitment to commerce over compassion, Big Pharma joined forces with the World Trade Organisation to coerce nations into accepting the TRIPS Agreement that closed the loopholes relating to other profitable drugs. Hamied considers this action to be genocidal, while Stiglitz notes that it means more Americans than ever before are unable to afford their pills. Furthermore, the subsequent rise in the cost of benefits packages helped contribute to the economic downturn, as employers could no longer meet their healthcare obligations.

An emotional William Haddad says that it makes no sense that millions are still dying from AIDS when a course of generics now costs under $100 per annum. But, as Peter Rost reminds viewers, nobody benefiting from a flawed system is going to change it voluntarily and he concedes that Big Pharma is essentially punishing the world for challenging its right to print money with ARVs. He hopes that Gray and his film can bring about necessary reform and prevent the 18 million deaths that the World Health Organisation claims occur each year because cheaper drugs are not available. However, both he and we already know that even a picture as righteously furious, meticulously compiled and impassionedly eloquent as this one stands next to no chance of persuading the rich to think of anyone but themselves.

Stylistically, this is a pretty basic offering. But content matters much more than form in cases such as this and Gray cogently states the facts while wisely allowing his talking heads to push the message. The juxtaposition of ordinary people, celebrities and experts is shrewd, but it might have been useful to include a few more self-condemnatory remarks from industry bigwigs or find another Damascean voice to back up Rost. But these are small quibbles with a film of great intellectual and emotional integrity that achieves everything it sets out to do and one can but hope it fares better than David France's Oscar-nominated How to Survive a Plague (which has still to be released in this country) in finding the audience it deserves.

Completing the week's documentary triptych, the estimable Marc Isaacs embarks upon a journey along the A5 in The Road: A Story of Life and Death. However, having met aspiring singer Keelta O'Higgins off the Irish ferry at Holyhead, he opts against picking up stories along the 260 miles of a route that partially follows the old Roman thoroughfare of Watling Street and allows himself to be guided by the maxim `there's no place like home' in deciding to examine the immigrant experience of seven people residing in his own Cricklewood and Maida Vale neck of the London woods. The resulting profiles are often compelling and poignant. But not all are accorded equal screen time and, consequently, a couple of characters rather drift off the radar, while the director's presence, both on the other side of the camera and in the voiceovers that serve as structural glue and philosophising soapbox, can be more than a little intrusive.

Having filmed for some 18 months, Isaacs interweaves fragments from his different storylines to create a living mosaic. However, it is more convenient to consider each subject in turn. Arriving with in Britain with a guitar, a suitcase, a pillow and her security blanket, Keelta hopes to make her name as a musician. But, while she gets warm applause for singing to the regulars at the Cricklewood pub in which she works and occasionally gets to guest with gigging bands, she seems to spend more time pulling pints than pursuing her dream. Almost as an afterthought, Isaacs films her at what appears to be an audition and she seems to do well. But her fate is far from clear as the picture ends.

Sadly, the same isn't true of compatriot Billy Leahy, an alcoholic who hasn't returned home in 42 years, during which time he built roads, laid pipes and worked on the Channel Tunnel. However, he has struggled to cope since his retirement and is now invariably `a day late and a pound short'. Lunching each day at a charity kitchen, he laments the decline of the local Irish community and shrugs at the failure of his attempts to play house and the breakdown in communication with his two sisters back home and a brother around the corner. Gulping down hooch in his kitchen and chiding himself for the mornings he has lost through over-indulgence, Billy lies on his bed and wistfully recalls the camaraderie of the rail gangs, which stands in stark contrast to the bitter reality that nobody noticed his absence for three days after he died and only a handful of mourners attended his wake.

Ninety-five year-old Peggy Roth found old age much more to her liking. She fled Vienna before the Anschluss and never saw her mother again, but she is convinced she has always watched over her and is now keeping her alive. Nearly blind, Peggy takes a nasty fall in the street, but carries on regardless. Indeed, little has bothered her since becoming a widow four years ago, as while she once adored the man she met in wartime London, he grew miserable, demanding and cruel after they married and she freely admits she was glad to lose him to Alzheimer's, as she can now devote herself to her classical music and her cat.

However, as the camera roves around a cosy home full of photographs and mementoes, it becomes evident that Peggy has died and, at the funeral, her granddaughter gives a pair of her favourite earrings to the Oriental cook from the nearby health food store, who had brought Peggy food every day. A year later, family and friends gather for the dedication of her headstone, which quite pointedly omits the word `wife' from a legend that reads: Adored mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and mother-in-law.'

Middle-aged German Brigitte Krafczyk also proved to be unlucky in love, as husband Royston Myers had an affair with her best friend while she was away working as an air hostess. However, even though they are now divorced, they still reside at the hostel she runs for language students. As she explains, they are bound by family love rather than personal passion and she turns a blind eye to his frequent dates and cold admission that he probably never loved her. Outgoing and interested in people, Brigitte makes a genial landlady, although she enjoys having a bolthole in which to hide away. She misses the excitement, glamour and companionship of flying, but is determined to make a success of her new enterprise.

The same eagerness to succeed drives Iqbal Ahmed, a dapper concierge at the Marriott Hotel in Maida Vale, who is reminded of his home in Kashmir by a Muharram procession in honour of Imam Hussein at Marble Arch. He believes people are twice disappointed on leaving the land of their birth, as they leave behind everything they have ever known and then find their new abode fails to live up to expectations. Having only been married for seven months, his day revolves around Skype conversations with new wife Asia, who is awaiting clearance to join him in London. He cuts a lonely figure as he goes about his duties and cycles home in the small hours at the end of his shift. But his fervent wish is granted when Asia is granted residency.

Such contentment seems at a premium across the road from Brigitte's premises, where a trio of Maghrebi men sing karaoke in the Horn of Africa café. One of them (seemingly called Sacha) is seen waiting on Sheldon Road in the hope he will be offered a day's work by one of the many van drivers scouting for cheap labour. He complains that British people are kinder to their pets than migrants, but Isaacs opts against following up this line of inquiry (which, to some extent, he has already considered in All White in Barking, 2007) and turns his attention instead to the fact that the A5 was a road to enlightenment trodden by medieval pilgrims and, while Collingwood and Burnt Oak don't feel like holy places, there are still pockets of sanctity.

Among them is the ordinary suburban house in which Burmese exile Nomm Raj prepares meals for the Venerable Uuttara and his fellow Buddhist monks at the end of their meditation fasts. A week after Nomm decides to become part of the order, Isaacs catches up with him and shows him praying before an altar bedecked in flashing lights in honour of the Buddha and striding out in the park, as he tries to keep up physically and spiritually with his new mentors. It is revealed that he will have to renounce his wife back in Burma, but claims it is worth making the commitment in order to start preparing for the next life now.

Despite refraining from overt judgements, Isaacs makes his opinions of the various protagonists pretty plain. But what will frustrate many viewers is the absence of both a unifying thesis and a sociological context for those not au fait with the neighbourhoods under discussion. The individuals themselves come across reasonably well, but the emphasis falls firmly on Billy and Peggy and, unsurprisingly, their passing provides the most poignant moments. Thus, this is much more a `story of life and death' than a study of `the road' , whose full historical and continuing social, economic and cultural significance still tantalisingly awaits analysis.

The scene shifts from the outskirts of London to the back end of beyond in Dominic Brunt's Before Dawn. As the vet in Emmerdale, Brunt is clearly familiar with the rolling Yorkshire landscape. However, he would also seem to be au fait with the films of George A. Romero, as this melancholic drama scripted by his off-screen wife Joanne Mitchell and Emmerdale writer Mark Illis concentrates more on the human side of a zombie plague than the gore. Consequently, rather like executive producer Marc Price's Colin (2008) and Keith Wright's Howard's Going Stiff (2012), this is as much about the loss suffered by the living as the dementia endured by the dead.

Leaving kids Holly Illis and Danny Mitchell-Brunt with grandma Eileen O'Brien, Dominic Brunt and Joanne Mitchell head into the Dales for a weekend away. Having taken out her frustrations at the gym with trainer Alan French, the workaholic Mitchell is determined to forget the office and the fact that Brunt is long-term unemployed in order to save a marriage that has been on the rocks since he had an affair.

They try to turn the bickering into banter on the journey, but are too preoccupied to notice the smear of blood on the bonnet of a carelessly parked car near their cottage. Similarly, they think nothing of the fact that the neighbour letting the property has vanished leaving the key in the door. However, they both panic when they hear noises upstairs and Mitchell's lawyer brain prompts her to scold Brunt for grabbing a carving knife to protect himself. Armed instead with a poker, he ventures up the creaking staircase and slowly opens the bedroom door - only for a dog to rush out and bolt into the gathering gloom. 

Following a candlelit supper, Brunt suggests that they fulfil a long-held dream to see the Great Wall of China. But Mitchell is too tired and tipsy to take him seriously and he is hurt when she claims she would prefer him to get a job and grow up than plan fantasy vacations. Brunt hides her phone in revenge and finds himself drowning his sorrows on the couch when she insists on having a good sleep. However, she wakes in the night and thinks she sees someone skulking in a nearby field. She rouses Brunt, who mocks her overactive imagination and grabs the wine bottle when she shuffles back to bed alone.

Next morning, Mitchell ticks Brunt off for hiding her phone and she ends yet another row by going for a run. She hasn't gone far, however, when she is bitten on the leg by a ravenous man whose turn of speed catches her by surprise. Disorientated, Mitchell loses her way and is in a fine state by the time she reaches the cottage. Despite nursing a hangover, Brunt tries to console her and clean the wound, but Mitchell pushes him away when he tries to take advantage of the situation by kissing her.

The police hang up when Brunt attempts to report the assault and he become concerned that something apocalyptic is occurring when he calls O'Brien to check on the children and she sounds terrified. Unable to get a signal on the radio or television, Brunt puts Mitchell to bed in a foul mood, as she has realised that he had previously stayed in the cottage with his mistress. Feeling sorry for himself, he wanders into the garage to find a trusty weapon and is set upon by a zombie hiding behind a seemingly immobilised Range Rover. Following a frantic tussle, Brunt splits the attacker's skull open with a tyre iron and hurries back indoors.

Shaken by his narrow escape, Brunt goes to check on Mitchell and has just noticed that the wound on her leg has started to fester when she opens a bloodshot eye and he bolts away in shock. She follows him downstairs and he just about manages to fight her off and lock her in the cellar. Afraid and uncertain what to do for the best, he is surprised by local Nicky Evans knocking on the door and begging for sanctuary. Brunt lets the garrulous stranger inside and lies that his wife has gone out. Evans suggests that they raid a supermarket and head for an island until the crisis is over. But he also lets slip that the owner of the grocery store in the village had allowed him to pass unmolested because he was feasting on the innards of a customer.

No sooner has the notion struck Brunt that the afflicted might revert back towards normality if their hunger is satiated than he stabs Evans in the back and finishes him off with the poker. He pushes the corpse down the cellar steps and follows after a decent interval to see that Mitchell has ripped the torso apart. He kneels beside her hoping she will recognise him when he shows her footage of the kids playing on her phone. However, she lunges at him and Brunt only just succeeds in slamming the door in her hideously disfigured face.

He calls the kids, only to hear them being attacked and slumps on the settee seemingly oblivious to the three zombies breaking down the door as he thinks back to happier times. But, when one of the creatures approaches him, Brunt leans forward with blood oozing out of his mouth and lets out a roar that doubles as an excruciating cry of despair.

The credits roll alongside a shot of O'Brien standing in a playground with a bloody mouth and a teddy bear in her hand. We are left to guess if she devoured her own grandchildren, but anything is possible in this grim fairytale world, in which enchanted cottages harbour dark secrets and handsome princes turn out to be ineffectual man-children incapable of saving their princess by performing a heroic task.

But, while the screenplay adroitly delves beneath the generic surface and Alex Neville's cinematography is as effective as Darren Grassby and Ian Jowett's effects make-up, Brunt's direction is less assured. His use of shakicam and smash cutting during the attack on Mitchell is clumsy in the extreme, while his own encounter with a rabid David Nolan in the garage is allowed to drag on far too long, even though the idea of staging a chase scene in such a confined space is essentially sound. Thus, while there is much to admire here, the components never quite gel and, as a result, the drama remains soap operatic, while the horror lacks bite.