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".
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