CAMPO DI BATTAGLIA
Italy, 2024, Directed by Gianni Amelio. Starring Alessandro Borghi, Gabriel Montesi, Federica Rosellini, Giovanni Scotti, Vince Vivenzio, Alberto Cracco, Luca Lazzareschi, Maria Grazia Plos, Rita Bosello. Running time 1h 44′ Distribution: 01 Distribution.
‘This is not a war film but a film about war. Usually, the genre veers towards the adventurous. My movie glosses over reflections and is a story about men. Hatred between people is a disease that needs to be eradicated. And cinema too, if motivated by decisive intentions, can contribute to this,’ this is how Gianni Amelio spoke of Battlefield last year in Udine at a press meeting held during the shooting of the film he wrote (with Alberto Taraglio) and directed.
Set in 1918, the final year of the First World War, the film moves away from the trenches to show the dramatic reality of the life and death of wounded soldiers who arrive at the field hospital from the front to be treated and then sent home because they are invalids, or sent back to fight. Naturally, some try by all means to avoid this second hypothesis, and their fate passes through the decisions of two doctors, divided by opposing views on whether their duties as officers or those as medical men should prevail.
Stefano Zorzi (Alessandro Borghi) is full of human compassion for the unfortunate men who have arrived at the hospital: they may speak a dialect he does not even understand, but he understands their terror and their desire to escape the insane madness of war all the same. On the other hand, Giulio Farradi (Gabriel Montesi) is permeated by a fanatical patriotic fury. For him, any soldier who voluntarily injures himself in an attempt to be reformed is a cowardly traitor to be punished without mercy, and even the most seriously wounded must be considered fit and enlisted after a few days of summary treatment.
At the hospital, nurse Anna (Federica Rosellini) arrives to help them. She is a fellow student of theirs, and they are both in love with her. However, the situation becomes even more complicated when the Spanish flu epidemic breaks out, claiming victims among civilians and soldiers, and no one knows how to deal with it.
The film was shot in Udine, Venzone, Tolmezzo, Osoppo, Gorizia, Cormons and Codroipo (Villa Manin), in the towns and countryside where the war was fought and invites everyone to reflect because, as Amelio concluded:
“We must ask ourselves where all this blood comes from. What is the malaise that forces people to kill other people? My three protagonists suffer the war, like millions of innocent people. I hope to put such a strong story in my film that the audience will have to come up with many questions to which they will have to give themselves an answer.
