'Notturno' changed me forever Rosi says in Venice

(ANSA) - VENICE, SEP 8 - Italian documentary maker Gianfranco Rosi says his latest film 'Notturno', presented at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, "has changed me forever".
    Rosi's film on Mideast wars and refugees is one of Italy's four pictures vying for the Golden Lion this year.
    The Asmara-born Roman director, 63, won Venice's top prize in 2013 with Sacro GRA, a tale of wacky lives on Rome's ring road.
    He won the Golden Lion in Berlin in 2016 with Fuoccoamare, a migrant drama set on the stepping-stone Sicilian island of Lampedusa.
    Rosi told ANSA Tuesday he had been "deeply shaken" by what he filmed for Notturno on the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon.
    He said he hoped the documentary would "open the eyes of people who have been anesthetized to what they see on TV about the effects of war.
    "What remains in me is a deep sense of love that I hope the audience will get too, this incredible sense of struggle in people who have suffered, who have had their lives overwhelmed by violence in their everyday life.
    "I wanted to recount their existence balanced between life and hell, try to identify with them, to establish contact and from all this bring home a different view of the Middle East".
    Notturno, Rosi said, "is born where breaking news on the latest shipwreck stops, on the last massacre, to try to give an intimate and profound dimension to what people only glimpse".
    (ANSA).