The Orphanage

Dir: Shahrbanoo Sadat (1hr 30mins) (cert TBC)

★★★★

In 2016. Shahrbanoo Sadat won a prize at Cannes for her “quasi-autobiographical” debut

Wolf and Sheep, about a group of shepherd children living in the mountains of central Afghanistan. This, her latest film, is the first of four planned sequels, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, following the life of one of these children. It is 1989 and Quodrat (Quodratollah Qadiri) is 15 years old. His parents have died, and he is now living in Kabul under Russian occupation, and is “obsessed” with Bollywood films. Arrested for selling cinema tickets on the black market, he is forced to go and live in a Soviet-run orphanage, where there is much bullying, but also opportunities for adventure. The film follows his day-to-day life, mixing realism with fantasy Bollywood sequences. It’s “a terrific child’s-eye movie, bustling with freshness and old-fashioned storytelling gusto”.

In its “understated” way, the film is “as heartfelt a love letter to the power of the movies” as Cinema Paradiso, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. The Bollywood sequences provide “sparky punctuation” in a film that might otherwise have become too episodic, and they movingly externalise Quodrat’s troubled inner life. Their glitter also hides a “grimmer truth” about the hardness of the regime endured by these kids, said Jordan Mintzer in The Hollywood Reporter: one boy is “going mad” and another is accidentally killed by ammunition he finds. Still, life under Soviet rule offers material benefits, and when, at the end, the orphanage risks tumbling along with the regime, you’re left with the “harrowing” feeling that for Quodrat, “it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire”. Available on Mubi.