When BBIF first asked me to write a review of Dearly Beloved, I embarrassingly realised I knew almost nothing about Belize. I didn’t even know where it was on the map. So I asked one of the organisers of the festival, and he casually replied, “It’s in Central America.” That simple answer sent me down a small spiral of curiosity — and by the time I began watching the film, I understood why he’d wanted me to see it. From its opening frames, Dearly Beloved revealed itself not just as a film set in Belize, but as a film about Belize — its people, its memory, its pulse. It’s less a story and more a meditation on a nation’s soul, told through images that breathe and linger long after the screen fades to black.

Dearly Beloved is unique because some films tell stories. Others, like Dearly Beloved, show a life which is slow and uneven, yet alive in its own rhythm. The Director of the film, Rasheed Hasan Joseph Palacio’s, meditative work is not about what happens, but about what it means to exist in a place haunted by memory and illuminated by grace. His home country, Belize, is both a sanctuary and a scar, a land whose beauty is inseparable from its grief. Watching it, the audience doesn’t so much “follow” the film as they drift through it, like a dream that refuses to resolve into something beautiful.

Palacio’s approach is neither documentary nor fiction. It belongs to that small, brave tradition of filmmakers who use cinema as a language of feeling rather than explanation — names like Chris Marker, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Terrence Malick come to mind. Yet Dearly Beloved isn’t a copy. It is grounded in a distinctly Belizean consciousness, one shaped by colonial history, indigenous spirituality, and the everyday rituals of survival. The film feels handmade, intimate, and restless, like a letter to a homeland that keeps changing even as it remains painfully familiar.

The images arrive like fragments — a hand brushing over water, smoke curling into the sky, faces caught between reverence and fatigue. Palacio doesn’t use these moments as mere decoration; they are his language, the way a poet arranges words to capture what can’t be said outright. Sound, too, plays a crucial role. The ambient hum of insects, distant church bells, and snippets of conversation bleed into each other, creating a sonic texture that feels like memory itself — layered, fragile, half-forgotten. When silence arrives, it lands with the force of revelation.

What’s remarkable is how Dearly Beloved turns stillness into emotional movement. Famous American film critic Roger Ebert once wrote that great movies are “machines for empathy.” Palacio’s machine runs quietly, powered not by dialogue or plot but by the recognition of shared fragility. The people we glimpse — farmers, children, elders in prayer — aren’t symbols or case studies. They simply are. Through them, the film honours a truth that every nation, every person, eventually faces: to love a place deeply is also to feel its wounds as your own.

There’s an undercurrent of mourning throughout the film. Not the loud, cinematic kind, but the quiet pain of lives lived under the shadow of loss. Palacio never specifies what was lost — perhaps history itself, perhaps innocence, perhaps the ability to look at one’s land without seeing its ghosts. In one sequence, the camera lingers on a decaying building being reclaimed by the jungle. The shot is so patient that it feels like a prayer. Nature and time collaborate to erase human traces, yet the image isn’t nihilistic. It’s tender — as if the earth, too, remembers.

What gives Dearly Beloved its power is its refusal to impose meaning. It invites interpretation but resists confinement. Palacio’s director’s statement makes this clear: the film moves like memory, dream, and ritual. And that’s exactly how it unfolds. The editing drifts between tempos — slow dissolves followed by sudden cuts, creating a rhythm that feels organic, even musical. You sense a filmmaker listening, not dictating. That humility — that willingness to let images speak in their own time — is rare.

Yet, the film’s abstraction may also test the patience of those who come seeking narrative clarity. Dearly Beloved doesn’t offer easy catharsis. It demands surrender, the same kind of openness one brings to meditation or prayer. For those willing to meet it halfway, the experience can be quietly transformative. You leave the film not with answers, but with a heightened awareness of texture — of wind, of water, of silence, of how memory clings to landscapes.

In the end, Dearly Beloved feels less like a film and more like a blessing. It’s about a nation, yes, but also about the condition of being human: our urge to belong, our fear of forgetting, our fragile hope that beauty can coexist with pain. Rasheed Palacio has created something rare — a work that dares to stand still in a world obsessed with speed. In doing so, he reminds us that to look deeply is itself a form of love.

I’d give Dearly Beloved a solid 4 out of 5 stars — not for perfection, but for presence. For simply existing as a work that dares to see, to feel, and to remember. Its very existence feels like an act of courage — a quiet, poetic testament to the power of cinema to preserve what might otherwise fade away.