Italy on Tuesday put up Gianfranco
Rosi's 'Notturno' for the best foreign film Oscar.
The shortlist of 10 films will be announced by the Academy on
February 9 next year.
The five nominees will be announced on March 15, and the Oscar
ceremony will take place in Los Angeles on April 25.
'Notturno' (Nocturne) by the 56-year-old documentarian Rosi,
shot over the course of three years in Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan,
and Lebanon, looks at ordinary people in Middle Eastern war
zones as they struggle and hope for more peaceful lives.
The film had its world premiere at the 77th Venice Film Festival
on September 9, then screened at the Toronto Film Festival on
September 15, and played at the New York Film Festival on
October 6.
Speaking at the Venice fest, Rosi told ANSA his latest
documentary "has changed me forever".
The Asmara-born Roman director won Venice's top prize in
2013 with Sacro GRA, a tale of wacky lives on Rome's ring road.
He won the Golden Lion in Berlin in 2016 with Fuoccoamare, a
migrant drama set on the stepping-stone Sicilian island of
Lampedusa.
Rosi said he he had been "deeply shaken" by what he
filmed for Notturno on the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and
Lebanon.
He said he hoped the documentary would "open the eyes of people
who have been anesthetized to what they see on TV about the
effects of war.
"What remains in me is a deep sense of love that I hope the
audience will get too, this incredible sense of struggle in
people who have suffered, who have had their lives overwhelmed
by violence in their everyday life.
"I wanted to recount their existence balanced between life and
hell, try to identify with them, to establish contact and from
all this bring home a different view of the Middle East".
Notturno, Rosi said, "is born where breaking news on the latest
shipwreck stops, on the last massacre, to try to give an
intimate and profound dimension to what people only glimpse".
Notturno was one of the Italian favourites for this year's
Golden Lion for best film, along with 'Padrenostro' by Claudio
Noce, Miss Marx by Susanna Nicchiarelli, and 'Le Sorelle
Macaluso' by Emma Dante.
Chloé Zhao's US drama Nomadland starring Frances McDormand won
the Golden Lion, and The Silver Lion - Grand Jury prize went to
Michel Franco's Mexican-French feature New Order.
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