Notturno

A documentary by Gianfranco Rosi. In Arabic and Kurdish with English subtitles. Streaming at VIFF Connect starting on Friday (March 5). 

Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi explores the remnants of war—physical and emotional—with a sweeping grandeur in Notturno, shot over three years in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Kurdistan.

It’s a movie about liminal space: border regions many have sought to reconfigure (most recently ISIS), but also nighttime and parts of the day when safety is not guaranteed. Rosi mentions locations in an opening text but after that he doesn’t orient viewers as he takes us between disparate vignettes.

We see psychiatric patients staging a play, Syrian children drawing pictures of atrocities in art therapy, Kurdish widows praying in a former prison where family members died. There are also images of people going about life.

Of a piece with Rosi’s previous films, Notturno is intensely observational and highly aestheticized, with scenes framed like classical paintings that astutely make use of negative space.

At its best, the approach demands thoughtful attention from the audience, but it can also veer into artfully self-conscious distraction. Ultimately it’s an ambitious view of war and places we don’t often see; where seemingly nothing is happening and yet so much is swirling beneath the surface—or just out of frame.