The “night” stretches from Lebanon to Iraq!

Venice | Italian director Gianfranco Rossi has not filmed the battle scenes, but the wounds left by the war resonate in every corner, on and off the shot. “Night” (Notturno) is a documentary that tells about a scientist and people who live in a permanent night, that is, in the border areas between Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Kurdistan. The Italian director spent three years with people who live where one thing ends and another begins. In the Middle East, where Rossi spent several years meeting people who lived in war zones, but wanted to tell stories and characters outside of the conflict. He stayed away from the front lines. It was where people were trying to fix their lives. Transfer everyday life to those who live along the boundaries that separate life from hell. The reverberation of war is here. We feel their oppressive presence in destroyed buildings, in children’s stories, in some of the terrifying WhatsApp messages sent by a female ISIS prisoner, in the machine gun shots heard from afar. A Russian camera shows a social scientist living in dire misery, with visible scars. Child labor is rampant. The men and women who survived war and terror endure its tragedy and cannot think ahead. In this world, there is not even room for anger. Crazy place, incredible situations that seem so normal to those who live there. Despite everything, there are small signs of hope: in a small house, boys and girls do their homework on the floor, in theatrical performances of a therapist in a psychiatric hospital, where art shows its political place. In the monologues of the patients of the health center, who speak of the failed dreams of that Arab Spring … of the religious fanaticism that massacred everything.

Gianfranco Rossi is from the Italian Documentary Film School. This school, which was introduced throughout the first decade of the 20th century, made a fundamental contribution to changing what a documentary is and what it can do. The Italian school introduces storytelling techniques to fictional cinema in documentary. The result is authentic, documented images that have been assembled, synthesized, and used to tell stories through scenes rather than speaking or putting someone in front of the camera to speak. Although Gianfranco Rossi is not well known outside of Europe, among the four films he has made, he won the Golden Lion in “Venice” in 2013 for the film Sacro GRA (the first documentary awarded in “Venice”). He also won the Golden Bear at the “Berlin Festival” in 2016 for the film “Fire in the sea” (the dangerous life of Arab immigrants at sea in the context of the normal life of the inhabitants of Sicily). Today, he returns to compete with his fifth film for the Golden Bear award.
Poetics are Russian films. Some of them criticize him, claiming that he transgresses the law and morality and exploits those who need to convey his reality in his films for the sake of purely aesthetic pleasure. But a Russian conveys the truth, and the truth is bitter. And if some white-skinned people could not believe that what is happening in front of them is something real, the problem is for them and not in Russian movies. “Night” is about ongoing civil wars, fierce dictatorships, invasions, and foreign intervention, all through to the end of “ISIS.”
A Russian dodged us. It doesn’t give us a way of knowing where we are or where he’s filming, who these people are and what they’re doing. No comments, no information to help us understand what we see on the screen, most are stories told through images. The goal is to create a unified feeling in the society, even if it is from different countries. Stories and stories transcend geographical divisions, what happens on the borders between Lebanon and Syria is the same as what happens between Syria and Iraq. Everywhere there are signs of violence and destruction. But in the foreground is the human being, in an illuminated film in this dark story. All people belong to a group, those who are far from the front, but who live in constant wars and mourning.
A Russian touch is evident throughout the film. In nature there are terrible scenes, but the last scenes, perhaps, are the strongest moments of the film. When we understand that children in school have witnessed terrible things happening before their very eyes. Traumatized children are time bombs. We do not listen to stories, nor does a Russian let children tell us these atrocities. Instead, he hits us with the drawings that these children have written on the school wall, as part of the decoration. A part of a reality that they see every day, that reveals what they saw without seeing or hearing it. Stylized drawings colored with blood, weapons and death.

Subscribe to «News» on YouTube here