Valley Of Innocent Branwen Okpako

In this first fiction feature film from the English born, Berlin residing documentary filmmaker Branwen Okpako, Eva Meyer (Nisma Cherrat) is a German police officer transferred from her comfortable position on the Frankfurt police force to Dresden, where she was originally raised as an orphan. Naturally, this return to the place of her youth forces a reconsideration of her place within German society, notably as the child of a Kenyan/German one night stand between her mother, Helga Einzig (a mellow-dramatic Angelica Domrose), and her mother's husband's student at the time, a young Kenyan named Shepherd. Treated as a potential scandal when she was born, Eva was left to fend for herself in the orphanage, with her real father banished from the university back to Kenya, and her mother's husband, to maintain his University position, becomes a secret German spy. Unable to confront her birth mother with this new information she awkwardly discovers, Eva anonymously mails it to her instead. Shortly thereafter, at the police office, Eva must respond to a report by her newly discovered step-sister regarding her missing mother and father, and in turn confront her mother face to face, this time over a possible homicide. Unfortunately, as exciting and personal as the plot sounds at times, the more Eva uncovers new information the slower the film moves; Okpako too often shows us Eva, played by first timer Cherrat, reading and reacting to documents and going through various other completely uncinematic motions, all far too naively meant to convey her loneliness and strength at pushing forward in a new city. Where in the hands of a more experienced director and actor the magnitude of the story could be effectively presented, instead the film feels like a boring and stereotypically melodramatic TV movie. (Teamworx)