Director

Gianfranco Rosi

Italy, France, Germany | 2020 | 100 min | Arabic, Kurdish

• Producer Donatella Palermo, Gianfranco Rosi, Serge Lalou, Camille Laemlè, Eva-Maria Weerts, Orwa Nyrabia
• Production Company Stemal Entertainment, 21Uno Film, Rai Cinema
• Screenplay Gianfranco Rosi
• Cinematography Gianfranco Rosi
• Editing Jacopo Quadri, Fabrizio Federico
• Sound Gianfranco Rosi
• Cast
• Contacts

  The Match Factory GmbH

  info@matchfactory.de

About the Film

In order to make Notturno, the director spent 3 years wandering along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon; borders that failed to build identities and unity, but, as Rosi points out, “stimulate hatred and vendettas. They generate minorities that soon become scapegoats. They represent power that does not care about the individual.”

The result of so much time spent in the area is not an articulate and profound visual essay on ISIS or their cruel rage against innocent people that were tortured, raped, and killed. On the contrary, the film captures scenes from the lives of people whose worlds have been interrupted and changed forever by war. In doing so, Rosi doesn’t even question the borders of documentary storytelling; he just breaks through them, eventually bringing us in a ‘terra incognita’ in which images bypass traditional narratives to directly strike at the hearts of the audience that feel first, then think about what they have seen.

For instance, there is a sequence in which a strong light illuminates the face of a woman, like a Caravaggio Madonna. The light comes from a phone, and the mother is listening to her daughter begging her not to let them kill her. The mother holds the phone as if she is cradling a baby. The same strong Caravaggio ‘chiaroscuro’ light is used for the prisoners of ISIS, but they seem to be straight out of a Dantesque hell.

There are sequences that are meaningful by themselves, like the brave Kurdish woman soldier exploring an abandoned building, and others like the teenager Ali, who seems to have found a precarious balance while everything is still crumbling around him.

And war? There are images of war, too. They flow on the screen of a tiny theater in the psychiatric ward of a hospital. War is just madness and darkness. But ‘Nocturne’—the English translation of ‘Notturno’—is, as Rosi writes, “an ode to the human being plunged in the darkness of war. As in a Chopin ‘nocturne,’ here, too, the darkness is a pretext, an opportunity to let what is living resound.”

Teresa Cavina