"Il varco" by Ferrone and Manzolini in competition at DocsBarcelona festival
1941. An Italian soldier is sent to the Ukrainian front. The Fascist Italian army is allied with the Nazi German machine, and victory seems close, but the Soviet resistance is very strong. Winter arrives, and dead, prisoners, and deserters come with it.
The immense steppe swept by snowstorm seems to be inhabited by ghosts.
Il varco - Once More Unto the breach is a work of fiction made with both official and amateur archive material. It is the subjective account of a soldier involved in the disastrous Italian campaign in Russia during World War II.
As we can read in the director’s notes, to create the story of a man drifted in the ‘hearth of darkness’ of war, directors Federico Ferrone and Michele Manzolini drawn upon imaginary apparently different and distant from each other: adventure novel, Russian folk and fairy tales, guilty conscience of Fascist Italy colonialism, diaries and memories by Italian soldiers in the Eastern Front.
Ferrone and Manzolini – maybe for first, made a work of fiction with private and public audiovisual documents of disparate origin merging them into a unique subjective point of view, and the narrative voice is also stream of consciousness.
Il varco is produced by Kiné, based in Bologna, in association with Istituto Luce Cinecittà, in collaboration with Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia and Rai Cinema, and with the support by Emilia-Romagna Film Commission.
The film, which premiered at the Biennale Cinema 2019 – 76th Venice International Film Festival, in the section Sconfini, was selected by DocsBarcelona Festival, in the competitive section What the Doc, dedicated to the most innovative documentaries on the international scene.
Only two Italian films are presented in this edition of the Festival, which takes place online.
Il varco is available on the Festival’s platform (exclusively in Spain) from May 23rd to 26th.
DocsBarcelona