NOTTURNO | FILM REVIEW
Dir: Gianfranco Rosi (15, 100 mins)
This immersive documentary provides glimpses into the lives of those caught up in the tragedies of the Middle East. Shot over three years, director Rosi shows us the scars of war through various people in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Kurdistan. Their stories and lives are presented through beautiful painterly shots, vast wartorn vistas, devastation, a fisherman out for the night illuminated by the fires of conflict, machine gunfire in the distance.
Rosi takes us into a rehearsal for a play at a Baghdad mental hospital, the patients attempting to learn the lines that show that their country has always been prey to tyranny and invasion. We witness a boy struggling to help his large family, working several thankless jobs, his blank face bearing witness to the drudgery of what he has endured and is going through. A platoon of young women soldiers patrol borderlands; ISIS prisoners stroll outside their yard in a break from their captivity. Most heartbreaking of all is Rosi’s glimpse into the lives of children, who have created drawings about their time under ISIS: chillingly matter-of-fact but telling volumes of the impact of atrocity.
Rosi, who also made the superb immigrant documentary Fire At Sea, allows his static camera to capture all these personal moments with no frills, apart from an often savage beauty. A horse stares at the camera as cars pass it on a busy street, a boy stares up at a tree in a raging gale as lightning flashes in the distance, a road collapses slowly into a river as cars carry on their journeys across it. Long shots linger on his subjects, listening to answerphone messages from loved ones abducted by ISIS, attempting to have a moment of peace as a couple as the occasional gun shot rings out. Notturno is a deeply human film, full of quiet but telling observation that brings the aftermath and ongoing daily brutalities of conflict to the fore with unflashy resonance.
Available from Fri 5 Mar on Mubi
words KEIRON SELF