Amelio at the Venice Film Festival: Not a war film, mine is a film “about war”

Two years after “The Lord of the Ants”, Gianni Amelio, from Magisano in Catanzaro, returns to Venice with “Campo di battaglia”, the first Italian title in the main competition. A work that seems to have its roots in our contemporary times because it talks about war, pandemic, courage, loyalty, professional ethics and other issues that are more current than ever, although the director, right from the start in the press conference, clarifies that his way of working, very emotional and not “at the table”, makes any form of certain planning impossible: “Everything can be upset, even after six or seven scripts, as my co-author and friend Alberto Taraglio knows well”.
The events depicted in the film take place at the end of the First World War, and the setting is that of a military hospital, where every day both seriously wounded soldiers and unscrupulous simulators who do not want to return to the front arrive from the front. The protagonists are two medical officers who have been friends since childhood, Giulio (Alessandro Borghi) and Stefano (Gabriel Montesi), very different in their respective professional goals, and with them Anna (Federica Rossellini), a friend of both since university and a volunteer at the Red Cross, who pays for the fact that she is a woman. The three friends will join forces when, towards the end of the conflict, an anomalous infection spreads among the soldiers and will also infect civilians. A plot that, against the backdrop of historical truth, veers towards a thriller, with some fictionalized passages, with the gripping writing of the director and co-screenwriter Alberto Taraglio, who were freely inspired by Carlo Patriarca’s novel «La sfida» (Beatbestseller).

A film that talks about men and wars without containing any war scenes, above all a product to be enjoyed in the theater. “The images of war paradoxically seem unreal today – explains the director – They are consumed in situations that are not those of the movie theater, which is a temple, the temple of the enjoyment of cinema: you enter even taking off your hat, being careful to receive emotions. When you are at home, with the television permanently on, you do something else while images of death arrive, and this causes a terrible addiction to war and to the concept of war. In that moment we suffer the emotions instead of participating in them”.

“Mine is not a “war” film but a film about war” – he concludes – and this increases its emotional strength”. A significant experience for the protagonists, who learned a new way of working. Alessandro Borghi emphasizes: «I have never met anyone like Gianni since I have been doing this job. He is a director who asks you what you think of the scene to be shot, making you responsible and part of the creative process, aware of the character you are going to tell. With him I have rediscovered a way of making cinema that no longer exists».
Great work of adaptation of Patriarca’s book by Amelio and Taraglio, who declared: «The original is halfway between an essay and a novel, and it was necessary to reinvent it from scratch, transforming the characters of the text into flesh-and-blood characters, with the story of a war stronger than the one at the front, because if Covid hit the elderly more, many young people died of Spanish flu, especially children».

In the front row at the press conference are some of the Amelio family: his brother Luigi, his daughter Samantha, a pillar of Rai Cinema, and his son Luan Amelio Ujkai, director of photography for the film. The cast also includes Alberto Cracco, Vince Vivenzio, Luca Lazzareschi and other actors from all over Italy who played the soldiers, including his nephew Giuseppe Amelio, in the role of a Calabrian soldier and, interpreters of Sicilian soldiers, the Neapolitan Giovanni Scotti and the debutant from Catania Maurizio Grassia. Produced by Kavac Film, Ibc Movie and One Art with Rai Cinema, “Campo di battaglia” will be in theaters from September 5 for 01 Distribution.