01/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: The veteran Italian director helps us interpret his film about the arrival of the fatal “Spanish flu” during the last year of the First World War

(© Fabrizio de Gennaro/Cineuropa)

In competition at the Venice Film Festival with Battlefield [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Gianni Amelio
film profile], Gianni Amelio helps us interpret his film, set during the last year of the First World War in an Italian military hospital near the front, in which work two medical officers (Alessandro Borghi and Gabriel Montesi) and a common nurse who is their friend (Francesca Rosellini), constrained to make difficult moral choices. But a new front opens for the doctors with the arrival of the fatal “Spanish flu”.

Cineuropa: In Battlefield, there are no trenches nor battles. Why did you choose to show the war without ever showing it?
Gianni Amelio: Images of war are now worn out, paradoxically unreal, because we see too many of them, every night TV broadcasts bombings, injuries, deaths, whether they are from Gaza or Ukraine. The cinema is a temple where one enters and is attentive to receiving emotions. I think that there is more war here than in a war film, because it is a film about war and that heightens its emotional power.

The film, set in 1918, dialogues then with the current moment?
In a certain way, the gaze that turns to the past is always turned to the future. The film touches feelings that go beyond time, thoughts that we’ve had so many times and questions that perhaps we still don’t know how to answer. But a film is not enough to stop wars, which are born out of lust for power. We are already in the midst of war in the reality of the everyday, whatever one’s moral position on what is happening is, in the Middle East for example. Power orders you to kill, to massacre poor people. The soldiers of the First World War were young men of 19 or 20, dying in hand-to-hand combat, and it is the same today. In Battlefield, the war continues in the hospital and stirs the feelings of two people who react in different ways: one follows his duty, the other wonders whether this duty is necessary or if there might be instead a different possible solution.

Is it therefore also about personal moral choices? One of the doctors manages to mutilate the soldiers to avoid their returning to the front to die.
This film is not a realistic apologue against war, but utopian. Everything goes in one single direction: wars hurt, victims are mostly innocents, so utopistically, it is better that there are no more arms to pick up rifles. It’s a paradox, sure, but one on which the moral of the film is founded.

In the film, we can hear the various regional dialects spoken by soldiers coming from every corner of Italy.
I had three wonderful actors in Borghi, Montesi and Rosellini, and a huge group of actors who spoke maybe just one line, but who have remained in my heart. For example, the soldier from Calabria who writes a letter to the priest of his village to tell him that he has taught him prayers, when instead he would like to swear. I wanted to dig in Italian regions and I discovered these marvelous actors, each with their own language.

(Translated from Italian)