29/10/2008

"Resolution 819 is reminiscent of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers in the way it relates an experience as if it were reality.” The compliment from maestro Ennio Morricone sounds even more flattering given that he composed the soundtrack to Giacomo Battiato’s film, which screened in competition today at the Rome International Film Festival.

A French/Polish/Italian co-production, the film tells the true story of 34-year-old French police officer Jacques Calvez (Benoit Magimel), who is sent by the High Court of Jutice of The Hague to discover what really happened in July of 1995 in the Bosnian city Srebrenica and to the people who disappeared.

"The Srebrenica massacre – in which 8,000 men were slaughtered and thousands of women raped by the Serbian-Bosnian militia before the eyes of helpless Dutch UN soldiers, some of whom received medals for their courage – was virtually ignored,” said Battiato. “It is proof of how confusing the country’s situation was and how crazy that civil war was. For us, media-wise everything on the Balkan conflict was lumped together and we could no longer distinguish anything".

This compelled the Italian director to depict the journey into hell of a policeman who for six years fights to uncover the endless mass graves and to find proof of the torture and crimes committed by the men taking orders from Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.

The film is not a documentary on Srebrenica because "I prefer using human beings who can relive certain situations and from the midst of the drama can evoke an emotional and sensitive rebellion in audiences,” said the director, who is currently writing a story on terrorism sent in Palestine in the late 1980s.

(Translated from Italian)