This story set in North Macedonia stars non-professional actors and follows ageing farmers trying to survive in a cockle-warming family film

Like director Tamara Kotevska’s previous feature Honeyland (which she co-directed with Ljubomir Stefanov), this sly, delightful film is neither a pure documentary nor a work of fiction. Instead, working with non-professional actors and a story clearly premeditated enough to earn a credit for its authors (Kotevska and Suz Curtis), this blends folk tale, improvisation and mud-caked vérité to tell the story of a contemporary farming family, the Conevs, in economically depressed North Macedonia.

Sixtysomething paterfamilias Nikola and his wife, Jana, have been growing watermelons, tomatoes and tobacco on the family land for years. However, the wholesale prices have recently dropped through the soil, prompting a mini riot by irate agricultural workers who take out their frustrations by destroying their own crops. Nikola and Jana’s daughter Ana decides to emigrate to Germany with her husband, taking their preschool-aged daughter with them, only to discover that most of their wages will be eaten up by childcare fees. They implore Jana to come out and be their childminder, leaving Nikola to try to sell the farmland for a pittance and find a job at a local landfill. Melancholy video-calls to the family abroad underscore his loneliness, but at least he has old mucker Ilija to talk to and share the odd bottle of hooch.

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© Photograph: Jean Dakar/Ciconia Film

© Photograph: Jean Dakar/Ciconia Film

© Photograph: Jean Dakar/Ciconia Film

While those who defend the status quo and those who say ‘simply rejoin’ the EU are both wrong, there is a new mood and a clear opportunity

Being right that Brexit was a bad idea is no substitute for knowing what to do next. Our chance of salvaging something from the mess it created is being undermined by those selling false hope – either that Brexit can work, or that it can be easily undone. For the 16,000 businesses that have now given up trading with Europe because of paperwork, prospects remain bleak unless the government stops offering a sticking plaster and starts major surgery on our future with Europe.

Forgive pro-Europeans for thinking the momentum is now with us. Labour has been slow to say what it wants from the EU reset, and slower still to acknowledge the inevitable tradeoffs required. Until the summer, ministers promised to “make Brexit work” and endlessly repeated “red lines”. Yet in recent weeks, a major study has found that leaving the EU cost the UK 6-8% of GDP per capita; now the chancellor calls the damage of Brexit “severe and long lasting”; the prime minister condemns the “wild promises” of the Leave campaign. Belatedly, a window of opportunity to change course may be opening.

Stella Creasy is the chair of the Labour Movement for Europe and MP for Walthamstow

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© Photograph: Gary E Perkin/Alamy

© Photograph: Gary E Perkin/Alamy

© Photograph: Gary E Perkin/Alamy

Collateral comedy spins out from underneath the repression and violence charted in this sobering documentary that follows three indefatigable women

There are many symptoms of totalitarian sickness gripping Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus. You risk being arrested for wearing red and white together, the colours of the outlawed flag of the country’s opposition movement. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has been banned, which seems rather on the nose. But these are just some of the more farcical elements, the collateral comedy spinning from the deep repression, violence and psychological wounds charted in this sobering film that follows a trio of Belarusian activists, starting from the pandemic through to the invasion of Ukraine.

Director Juliane Tutein fashions a melancholic mood-piece which chronicles ineffectualness in the face of impregnable state machinery, and the meaning of resistance under such circumstances. Nina, who is 74, is a kind of Belarusian Batman; an indefatigable symbol of protest who is immune to repression because of her fame. Human rights activist Darya runs her organisation in exile in Vilnius after student activism landed her in hot water. Tanya has stuck it out near Minsk while her husband and son have fled to Kyiv, but her human-rights NGO and film festival are in the authorities’ crosshairs.

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© Photograph: True Story

© Photograph: True Story

© Photograph: True Story

Europe has backed the idea of a ‘reassurance force’ to help Ukraine rebuild its war-weary army, but what does that mean in reality?

© Getty

We can move from defensive crouch to position of strength but only if we use the economic cards we have against US coercion

Europe is on a trajectory towards nothing less than “civilisational erasure”, the Trump administration claims in its extraordinary new National Security Strategy, a document that blames European integration and “activities of the European Union that undermine political liberty and sovereignty” for some of the continent’s deepest problems.

Everybody should have seen it coming after Washington’s humiliating 28-point plan for Ukraine. JD Vance’s shocking Munich speech in February, in which he suggested that Europe’s democracies were not worth defending was an early red flag. But the new words still land as a shock. The security document is the clearest signal yet of how brutally and transactionally Washington wants to engage with the continent. It marks another phase in Trump’s attempt to reshape Europe in his ideological image while at the same time abandoning it militarily. US policy, the paper says, should enable Europe to “take primary responsibility for its own defence”.

Georg Riekeles is associate director and Varg Folkman a policy analyst at the European Policy Centre

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© Photograph: Yassine Mahjoub/SIPA/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Yassine Mahjoub/SIPA/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Yassine Mahjoub/SIPA/Shutterstock

From digging trenches and building walls, to learning survival skills, Poland is increasingly aware of risks posed by its eastern neighbours

Cezary Pruszko still remembers the civil defence training of his Communist-era schooldays – map reading, survival skills, and a sense that the danger of war was real and ever present.

“My generation grew up with those threats. You didn’t have to explain why this mattered,” said the 60-year-old Pruszko, as he refreshed those skills at an army base outside Warsaw on a recent frosty Saturday morning. With dozens of other Polish civilians, he toured a bomb shelter, fitted gas masks and practised striking sparks from a flint to start a fire.

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© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

Painting of Enlightenment figure, whose constitution for the island inspired revolutionaries in US, is up for auction

Thirty years ago, a painting by the British artist Sir William Beechey was sold as “portrait of a man”.

The anonymous buyer, however, knew precisely who the unnamed man in the picture was: Pascal Paoli, the 18th-century Corsican independence leader and icon of the Enlightenment.

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© Photograph: Asta

© Photograph: Asta

© Photograph: Asta

Sir Keir Starmer will meet with Volodymyr Zelensky, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz in London on Monday

© AP

Plusieurs membres de la Coalition des volontaires vont se retrouver ce lundi 8 décembre à Londres pour une réunion consacrée aux discussions en cours entre Washington, Moscou et Kiev pour tenter de mettre fin à la guerre en Ukraine. Emmanuel Macron et le chancelier allemand Friedrich Merz sont attendus dans la capitale britannique à l’invitation du Premier ministre Keir Starmer. Ils seront ensuite rejoints par le président ukrainien Volodymyr Zelensky.

L'agence internationale pour l'énergie atomique (AIEA) a annoncé, dimanche 7 décembre, que ses équipes étaient en Ukraine pour y évaluer la sécurité nucléaire de la centrale de Tchernobyl. L'AIEA dit avoir constaté que l'arche, le bouclier de protection de la centrale nucléaire, endommagé par un drone explosif en février dernier, avait perdu « ses fonctions de sécurité primaires ». Cette arche recouvre le réacteur qui a explosé en avril 1986, et protège un premier sarcophage.

Les Varois ont débuté leur campagne européenne ce dimanche par une défaite chez les Écossais (33-20).

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Les Béarnais, après un quart de siècle d’absence dans la grande Coupe d’Europe, se sont inclinés ce dimanche face aux Saints (27-35), finalistes de la dernière édition.

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L’entraîneur du Stade Toulousain Ugo Mola a apprécié la prestation collective de son équipe face aux Sharks (56-19), mais pointe du doigt des performances individuelles insuffisantes chez certains.

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Le Stade Toulousain n’a pas tremblé face aux Sharks de Durban (56-19) à Ernest Wallon. Retrouvez les tops et les flops du match de Champions Cup.

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Les Toulousains ont assuré l’essentiel ce dimanche avec un large succès bonifié face aux Sharks de Durban (56-19), qui leur permet de prendre la première place de la poule 1.

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Les Rouge et Noir, en quête d’une septième couronne continentale, ont ce dimanche infligé une véritable correction aux joueurs de Durdan (56-19).

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