Not­turno

A shaft of light from a win­dow in a for­mer prison some­where in the Mid­dle East cuts a dynam­ic diag­o­nal along an adjoin­ing wall, where a moth­er is dou­bled over in grief for the son who lost his life there. It’s an image of such com­posed poise it could be from a Car­avag­gio canvas.

Yet just as we’re pon­der­ing whether such visu­al beau­ty has a place in this are­na of pain, we cut to a close-up where the woman views pho­tos of her boy, his bat­tered face and the noose around his neck sug­gest­ing they were tak­en just after his mur­der. The tran­si­tion from aes­thet­ic allure to bru­tal real­i­ty does not make for com­fort­able view­ing: is the close-up on those gris­ly snaps intru­sive and pos­si­bly exploitative?

Direc­tor Gian­fran­co Rosi knows what he’s doing. He wants us to ask that ques­tion, because his films thrive on pro­duc­tive jux­ta­po­si­tion. His pre­vi­ous, Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed film Fire at Sea, for instance, made the very point that life went on blithe­ly as nor­mal for the islanders of Lampe­dusa while tragedy unfold­ed off-shore in the Mediter­ranean migrant cri­sis, while 2013’s cap­ti­vat­ing Sacro GRA, sug­gest­ed how social­ly diverse near-neigh­bours in and around Rome’s ring road might as well exist in sep­a­rate universes.

Cap­tured over three years in bor­der regions of Syr­ia, Iraq, Kur­dis­tan and Lebanon, this new film – titled after the Ital­ian for night – offers no cap­tions to tell us exact­ly where we are at each moment, yet its jux­ta­po­si­tion of painter­ly beau­ty and hor­ri­fy­ing real­i­ty is a con­stant, leav­ing us to fig­ure out its ulti­mate significance.

What Rosi los­es here is the telling speci­fici­ty of his ear­li­er work, and there’s cer­tain­ly a dan­ger his fres­co of the war-torn Mid­dle East reduces a com­plex sit­u­a­tion to an over-sim­pli­fied omnisham­bles. That said, his film’s med­i­ta­tive pac­ing and mosa­ic struc­ture turn it into a sort of woozy docu-rever­ie, which proves seduc­tive­ly immer­sive, mov­ing between mag­ic-hour land­scapes with the flames of war in the dis­tance, to star­tling­ly framed vignettes of mil­i­tary activ­i­ty, and a recur­ring focus on how peo­ple try to move beyond their past sufferings.

Hence, there’s har­row­ing footage of chil­dren explain­ing how their draw­ings depict the tor­ture and mur­der per­pe­trat­ed by ISIS forces on their Yazi­di com­mu­ni­ty, and we see patients at a psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tal in rehearsal for a the­atri­cal per­for­mance con­fronting the destruc­tion of their lives. The draw­ings are crude yet ele­men­tal, the play rudi­men­ta­ry yet sin­cere, and the process they rep­re­sent offers a glim­mer of hope in the dark­ness. Does Rosi see his film, or indeed film­mak­ing per se, as an equiv­a­lent aes­thet­ic response to daunt­ing­ly awful history?

In which case, Rosi’s rap­tur­ous images then have their place, while there’s also an infer­ence of affir­ma­tive renew­al in his calm­ly con­trast­ing sequences of a fam­i­ly sim­ply get­ting on with the every­day, sup­port­ed by their eldest son earn­ing a few dol­lars by fetch­ing and car­ry­ing for pass­ing duck hunters. In the lad’s watch­ful gaze, eyes to the sky, Rosi presents a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly non-obvi­ous image of resilience to cap this rumi­na­tive exam­ple of his lat­est refine­ment of the doc­u­men­tary form.