10/09/2010

After the controversy, which has been plentiful, as expected (the director claims someone close to the Defence Ministry put pressure on family members of the Nasiriyah bombing victims to get the film blocked), what remains to be said of Aureliano Amadei’s debut feature 20 Cigarettes [+see also:
trailer
film profile], accoladed in the Controcampo Italiano section at Venice?

The film offers a fresh perspective on a crucial event in our recent history (at a Mostra which has often looked at distant and not-so-distant Italian history, from the Risorgimento in Martone and Pannone’s films to 1960 by Salvatores): the November 2003 bomb attack against the military police barracks in Nasiriyah, Iraq, which killed 19 people (as well as some Iraqi civilians).

Amadei (played in the film by an impressive Vinicio Marchioni) was there: a student at DAMS and a staunch pacifist, he defied his friends’ doubts by leaving for Baghdad, alongside director Stefano Rolla (Giorgio Colangeli), to research locations for a film, guided by soldiers and army officers. But the experience was short-lived: enough time to get to know someone who sets out on a peace mission and finds himself confronted with a theatre of war, enough time to smoke the twenty cigarettes of the title.

Then a lorry smashes into the roadblock, there’s an explosion, followed by blood. In one word: tragedy. This is all filmed using point-of-view shots – with cinematography by Vittorio Omodei Zorini – not for stylistic effect, but for narrative reasons, in an attempt to stick faithfully to the memory of that day. This memory is all the more precious as it doesn’t always coincide with the official version of events (particularly with regard to certain supposed acts of heroism). Those agitated moments are the core of the film, “raw and indisputable” according to the director.

Elsewhere, the tone is one of “coming-of-age” comedy (with a rather vague romantic subplot, featuring Carolina Crescentini). Amadei keeps up the irony when he moves on to his amusing “j’accuse” against the media circus which broke out on his return to Rome, with journalists and politicians gathered around his hospital bed (where he was recovering from a gangrenous ankle, perforated eardrums and hundreds of shrapnel fragments left in his body). They were looking for a “martyr” and instead they found a “witness”. In ancient Greek, the two words overlap, as priests used to explain in catechism lessons when talking about the first Christians: in present-day Italy, “witnesses” are far more inconvenient.

Co-written by the director and Francesco Trento (based on their novel “Venti Sigarette a Nassirya”), in collaboration with Gianni Romoli and Wolfango De Biasi, the film has already been released in Italian theatres by Cinecittà Luce. It was produced by R&C Produzioni.

(Translated from Italian)