THE STOLEN CHILDREN (directed by Gianni Amelio. Stars Enrico Lo Verse, Valentina Scalici, Giuseppe Ieracitano)

In A Perfect World, Kevin Costner snatches a child from the bosom of a loving, if restrictive and dysfunctional family. The youngsters in The Stolen Children are not kidnapped but placed in the official charge of a young policeman, whose job is to escort them to a children’s home. The same process of road movie bonding unfolds between the adult and his charges, but this Italian drama is more than just an ocean away from Hollywood.

For a start the band of dysfunction is genuinely disturbing: 11-year-old Roseta (Valentina Scalici) has been forced into prostitution by her mother. She and her little brother Luciano (Giuseppe Ieracitano) are escaping slum existence, but escaping to what? They already seem so much more world-weary than the 19-year-old carbiniere Antonio (Enrico Lo Verso) whose growing affection for them seems to stem more from naïveté than a genuine concept of paternal care.

This understated, Italian road movie keeps threatening to burst into an epiphany of sentimentality, but instead, by simply letting its tale unfold without comment, services up a devastating commentary on the failure of adults to give children what they need. With none of the deliberate manipulativeness of A Perfect World, (it) shows up far more clearly, and with more genuine poignancy, the almost routine nature of failure.

Although, after taking the children on a three-day detour to bring a little light into their lives, Antonio is accused of kidnapping, the overwhelming sense is not so much that the children have been stolen, more that something vital has been stolen from them. Like youth. And hope.

A memorable, bittersweet little odyssey.