The Italian duo Federico Ferrone and Michele Manzolini have been working together for years, and they presented this impressive experimental and essayistic, but also poetic documentary at the festival in Venice. Their editor Maria Fantastica Valmori received the award for the best editing in the selection for the European film of the year, and it is a film with a very special style and aesthetics. The authors found inspiration in the diaries of several Italian soldiers who were sent to the eastern front as Nazi allies in the summer of 1941. In the introduction of the film, we learn that Germany has just attacked the Soviet Union, and already the following month, loyal allies the Italians sent the first soldiers to the east of Ukraine.
And exactly where the war rages again today. While the narrators are reading entries from the diary of an unnamed Italian soldier who is lucky enough to know Russian because his mother was Russian, we follow archival footage of a train journey. From Italy through Austria, Hungary, Romania, through Ukraine, deeper and deeper towards the heart of darkness and the front line, where that unnamed soldier headed, whose thoughts and experiences we listen to. The shots we see are perfectly complemented with the narration or the stream of consciousness of that unnamed soldier who roughly assumes what awaits him because he already has experience of the war in Ethiopia. However, what will await him there is something that I guess no one can prepare for.
From time to time, these archive recordings of the Second World War are supplemented with current recordings of the places through which the Italian soldier passes, and the whole audio-visual impression is completed by the fantastic music of Simonluca Laitempergher. Indeed, “Il Varco” is one of those films that could be described as a complete package, an almost perfectly tailored cocktail in which all the ingredients are perfectly hit. It is an atmospheric film, deep, impressive, with a duration of 70 minutes, extremely effective and completely rounded. The viewer really gets the impression that he is traveling with this unnamed Italian soldier-poet and as if we are really seeing everything that he saw then. It’s as if we’re traveling into some terrifying nightmare, a horrible nightmare that, instead of ending, gets worse and more terrifying, and there seems to be no way out of it.