Culture: "Notturno", a documentary in a war zone on the "victims of history"
Italian director Gianfranco Rosi.
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2 min
A documentary film takes us on a journey with its author, the Italian Gianfranco Rosi, to the Middle East devastated by the various conflicts.
Notturno
, “Nocturne” does not seek to film violence, but its traces through unforgettable portraits of men, women and children who still live in these war zones.
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It is a long-term documentary, not for its length, one hour and forty, but for the time it took for its author to shoot it, more than three years traveling through Kurdistan, Syria, Lebanon, borders of Iraq, alone with his camera.
He came back with 90 hours of footage, after spending months with his characters before starting filming, observing their daily rituals, so that his camera would become invisible during filming.
aftermath of war
All around, signs of destruction, the after-effects of war and conflict on the bodies and minds of those they film, Kurdish fighters, mothers of soldiers, Yazidi children. Mothers who mourn their son killed in prison, children who draw pictures of the horrors they have witnessed, or even survivors abandoned in a mental asylum: witnesses who are victims of decades of conflict in the Middle East are at the center of Rosi's film. Their bruised silence speaks volumes.
In one of the scenes from the film, a child in a classroom explains to his teacher that his colorful drawings showing mountains, the sun and a cluster of houses represent the day the Islamic State group came to “
exterminate
” his Yazidi village.
The child then calmly shows the drawings of his comrades taped to a wall: beheadings, hangings, women in chains or burnt alive.
A film "about people"
The director said he was tired of the journalistic coverage of the war, his images of the wounded, explosions or fields of ruins.
"
I wanted to make a film about the people who are victims of all this,
" he told AFP.
Sixth film by Gianfranco Rosi, multi-award-winning author rewarded among other things with a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2013 for his documentary
Sacro GRA
,
Notturno
sets out to meet his characters without being intrusive or voyeuristic.
By its refusal of any contextualization, the film can surprise or even shock.
But he wins in another area, that of intimacy.
Because time has allowed Gianfranco Rosi to see part of life in the front lines and to film a certain normality there.
It is this normality, so fragile, however shaky it may be, which is the price of his film.
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