Notturno: Images say it all in haunting documentary about the survivors of ISIS's brutal 'caliphate'

By Karen Gordon

Rating: A-plus

There’s a scene about mid-way through Gianfranco Rosi’s haunting documentary Notturno that I haven’t been able to shake. 

A boy, about eight years old, stands in front of a wall covered with drawings that he and other children have drawn. A young woman, sits in a chair and calmly asks him to tell her what he’s drawn.  

The little boy is Yazidi, and a survivor of one of the brutal massacres of his people by ISIS. He looks over his drawings and with a slight stutter talks about the unimaginable horrors he’s witnessed. 

Scavenging near the Iran-Iraq border in Notturno.

Rosi doesn’t embellish or linger longer here than he needs to. He’s not after sensationalism, or trying to manipulate your emotions, or pushing a particular political point of view. Notturno is not your conventional anti-war doc. 

The images in Notturno, are so visually beautiful that they often look like paintings, or gallery photography.  But the stories they tell are often the hideous polar opposite of beauty. Rosi spent three years shooting his film, on the borders between Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan and Lebanon.  These are countries that have experienced war, authoritarian regimes and the brutal caliphate of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant..

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But Rosi ’s focus isn’t on war or politics. Instead he turns his eye on the daily lives of a range of people affected. Among them: a squadron of Kurdish women soldiers (members of the  Women’s Protection Units), patients at a psychiatric facility rehearsing a play, a woman who appears to be running an orphanage, and that heart-wrenching scene of  Yazidi children working through the trauma of being held by ISIS in what appears to be a form of art therapy.  

Meanwhile, not all of what we see is as difficult. Sometimes we’re just watching people go about daily life. 

Rosi has stripped his film of all of the conventions of documentary. There are no voice-overs. There’s nothing on screen to identify where we are, or the names of the people. There are no talking heads, no experts putting things in context, no timelines and no backstories of how a specific conflict played out.  

There’s not even music. Rosi allows for long sequences that are silent except for natural, ambient sound. 

The result is a documentary that leaves space for the viewer to have their own emotional reaction.  Most of the people we meet have suffered greatly. But oddly, in spite of all the pain, what sticks in Rosi’s Notturno is a feeling of resilience. 

Notturno, which simply means night in Italian, was Italy’s submission for the 2021 Oscar’s Best International film category, and is on the short list for the Academy’s Documentary category. 

Notturno. written and directed by Gianfranco Rossi. Debuts on Tuesday, March 2 on VOD and  the Digital TIFF Bell Lightbox.