Secrets of the Heart

A nine-year-old gradually discovers the skeletons in the family closet when he and his elder brother, who live with their aunts in Pamplona during the 1960s, pay a visit to their widowed mother in a Pyrenean village. The portrait of lives partly defined by repression and superstition is sensitive, the re-creation of the rituals of rural Basque life fascinating, and the characterisations mostly subtly detailed. Unlike such comparable films as The Spirit of the Beehive and Cria Cuervos, however, this one never really pulls away from the curious young protagonist to tell us much about the wider political realities of the period.