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ROME FILM FESTIVAL Competition

Tanovic at war again

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“The problem with you war people is that you think you’re immortal,” says Doctor Talzani (Branco Djuric) to photographer Mark Walsh (Colin Farrell, who lost weight for the role) in Bosnian filmmaker Danis Tanovic’s Triage [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, which opens the Rome Film Festival tonight.

Mark is a war photographer who has worked in Kurdistan since 1988, but he is neither immortal nor immune to “collateral damage”. In fact, Mark returns to his native Dublin in bad shape, not the man he once was. His worried wife (Spain’s Paz Vega) asks help of her Francoist grandfather (Christopher Lee), who after Franco’s victory in Spain saw to the “psychological redemption” of the Falange. Who better than he to dig through Mark’s past, to understand what really happened to him and to Mark’s best friend, a fellow reporter who never returned from Kurdistan?

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The problem with Triage, which Tanovic adapted from the eponymous novel by Scott Anderson, is that viewers can quickly guess where the story will end up, as it spans the entire repertoire of the genre’s clichés: from guilt to the ethics of being an onlooker.

Those who hoped that a return to the battlefield would have benefited the director of No Man’s Land [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
– who stumbled after that Oscar-winning film with the Kieslowskian Hell [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
– will be partially disappointed. Not that the film is ineffective in revealing the tragic paradoxes of every conflict (the triage of the title is an makeshift one along the mountainous border with Iraq, where Talzani tries to save whomever he can, killing those he can’t with a bullet to the head), but they are outnumbered by the conventional moments, despite being expertly executed by a cosmopolitan crew (including Irish DoP Seamus Deasy and Italian editor Francesca Calvelli).

Produced by Asap Films, Parallel Films, Castafiore Films e Tornasol Films (with support form the Irish Film Board and in association with Aremid Entertainment, Hanway Films – which handles international sales –, Coficup 2 & 3 e Backup Films), Triage was backed by Eurimages and will be released in Spain on November 13 and in Italy on November 27 through 01.

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(Translated from Italian)

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