Rotterdam p1: ANNA (dir. Alberto Grifi, Massimo Sarchielli)

It’s customary for me at festivals to have certain phrases of a program guide description floating through my head, mantra-like, while watching the film. For the recently unearthed Italian doco Anna – focusing on a teenage, pregnant homeless girl’s recovery under the wings of two opportunistic filmmakers – the program sez “they film her slow recovery from feral homeless person to human being”.

Aside from the unfortunate phrasing, it also points to what Anna is (quite perversely) not; ie, a streamlined story of a young woman following any arc let alone a triumphant one. It’s a digressive, unwieldy time capsule, shot in an early video that makes its human subjects – a whole range of characters, many not even related to the titular one – look like fuzzy ghosts, or a degraded VHS copy of Warhol screen tests.

If there’s one film it evokes, it’s Robert Kramer’s similarly sprawling, doco-fiction hybrid Milestones, also from the same year. Anna, like Kramer’s film, jumps between the micro and macro, only on a much smaller scale than Kramer's panoramic depiction of US post-Vietnam disillusion. In Anna, intimate, even voyeuristic details (lice being cleaned from Anna's pubes) are juxtaposed with a snapshot of the broader social context (eg, feminist groups beaten by police). Much of it is comprised of closeups of faces, and in its countless scenes of café table political debates between (mostly) hippies, it becomes concerned with the way ideology is stymied by the messiness of human affairs.

Anna is sloppy filmmaking, by design; implicitly positing that capturing a historical moment must come at the expense of ‘good form’. And once the filmmakers’ treatment and exploitation of Anna becomes an issue, it only gets more digressive, bringing in ‘flashbacks’ that don’t really add much except for adding another shambolic layer. Ultimately though, the scattershot approach, combined with the often excruciating blocks of spent in the company of some fairly repugnant people works to the film’s advantage, transforming it into a lament for an impotent hippie culture that no one would want to bring a child into.