The desperation of survival

Italian doc in Toronto puts a face to innocent victims of war

Murtaza is an Afghan child who lost his right arm playing with a mine. Yagoub is a Sudanese teenager with a bad heart. Both are innocent victims of war, in Kabul, where the fight against the armed Taliban resistance continues, and in Khartoum, the complex multiethnic Sudanese puzzle where Darfur rebels continue to rape and plunder.
On the one side is the backdrop of women wearing burqas at the marketplace, of goats being sacrificed during Kalash to celebrate the spring solstice, convoys of Italian soldiers, and smoke from bomb explosions. On the other side are donkey carts being pulled along unpaved paths, smoke from incense, a school in a refugee camp where the dangers of war are taught, and severe poverty that forces a paid-health system – a system made evident by the words of the tribal leader telling Yagoub’s mother that he doesn’t have the $5,000 for the operation: “If God decides that he is to live, he’ll be lucky.”
Afghanistan, like Sudan, is where war destroys almost all human rights. Directors Fabrizio Lazzaretti and Paolo Santolini, through Murtaza and Yagoub, describe war victims and the precious work the humanitarian organization Emergency has been doing the past 15 years. All in the film Back Home Tomorrow (Domani torno a casa) that will be presented at the Human Rights Watch Festival on March 5.
With images of the two boys, the Italian directors are present at the surgery centre in Kabul where Murtaza is suffering with an amputated hand, which the mother has authorized by signing with a red-ink-stained thumb, and in the cardio-surgical hospital on the outskirts of Khartoum, the new “Centro Salam”, where Yagoub is saved from a rare and serious heart illness, because that is where emergency staff operate for free.
“It’ll be ok,” his mother encourages Yagoub, “we’ve slept with snakes – no one can imagine what we went through.”
Back Home Tomorrow is a new chapter on Afghanistan after Jung – in the Land of Mujaheddin that Lazzaretti created with Alberto Vendemmiati. The film – that tells the story of the Emergency hospital project set up to assist war victims in northern Afghanistan, the land of the Northern Alliance guerrillas – was also presented at the Toronto and Vancouver International Film Festival in 2001 where it won National Film Board Award for best documentary.
Today, also on occasion of Emergency’s first 15 years of activity (it has treated over 3.2 million people in the war zone), Lazzaretti takes this new work to Toronto will screen on March 5th at 7 p.m. as part of TIFF Cinematheque’s Human Rights Watch Canada Committee. After the presentation at Venice Festival, Back Home Tomorrow was purchased by the BBC which decided to carry it over the network, in contrast to the reticence the movie is encountering in Italy.

How was the project Back Home Tomorrow created?
“It was created from the strong relationship with the Emergency association which we’ve had the opportunity to work with from 1999 to 2001 in Afghanistan, when the Gino Strada organization decided to open the first hospital to treat and rehabilitate victims of the Afghan conflict. For a few years our paths separated, after which, once we found out they were planning the construction of a heart-surgery centre to help civilian victims of the war, we thought, along with Paolo Santolini, to document what was taking place. What impressed us very strongly is that Emergency once again wanted to create a structure based on the principle that everyone has the right to free and qualified treatment with the conviction that the right to health is much more that just being treated with two aspirin or a slap on the back. In practice, the organization, as well as treating war injuries, has begun operating in other areas, which led to our idea of a new film that, by way of the two stories, allowed a glimpse of the past, present, and future of a humanitarian organization that has been committed to all fronts of the war for years.”

You were present for day after day of surgeries, amputations, desperation – the caption at the end of the film reads that ‘Emergency treats a person every three minutes’. What was your emotional experience on that painful reality?
“It’s not the first time I watched surgical procedures what were hard to document and film. Let’s say it helps a lot to have a video camera that’s like a filter during those moments you’re there during an operation. That helps, also because while you’re filming you’re concentrating on other aspects and in a certain sense that can diminish the powerful images of an injured person being carried in with a mangled leg or other physical damage.”

In Back Home Tomorrow the focus in on the sick and on children, and it places the work of doctors as secondary. Why that choice given that the film is dedicated to Emergency?
“It was a calculated decision with respect to Jung – in the Land of Mujaheddin which was centred on the doctors’ human and professional adventure as they’re forced to face crises and difficulties to set up a hospital in such a difficult land as Afghanistan. This second documentary film Back Home Tomorrow is focused on patients and especially on two boys because they represent thousands, or rather, millions of children who live in similar conditions and don’t have the right to treatment.”

A human experience that probably opened your eyes to a different reality regarding women and children in these poor countries – which is apparent from the imagery. Is that what it’s really like?
“For sure. For better or worse, those are things that stay with you and therefore contribute to your internal growth.”

You filmed during wartime: Were you ever fearful during filming? Was it difficult to get to Emergency hospital in Kabul?
“We didn’t have a lot of difficulty because, apart from a few attempts, the real war is outside the large cities. The government and forces of authority control the large centres – 20 kilometres outside the city is no-man’s land. Anyways, this time we spent a lot of time inside the hospital except for some travel time, so I can say there was nothing particularly dangerous.”

You would have certainly gathered a great deal of material over two years of shooting. Was the editing difficult? Did you have to sacrifice some stories or scenes?
“Yes, hundreds of hours. A lot was dedicated to the transcription but above all to translating the various languages that occur in the film. In Africa we had to find a local translator who spoke Maba dialect that is understood by just 3,000 people on the entire continent, and who in turn translated it with some difficulty into an Arabic which was then translated into English and finally into Italian. In Afghanistan though, we had a local translator – dialogues were then passed on to another translator in Italy. In a documentary of this type, where the dialogue is fundamental, pretty well everything has to be translated to combined to the film shoots and at times details come out that are very important for the film.”

It must have been a wonderful achievement to capture the lives and emotions of two children just through images. It all seems unscripted – the audience learns what is taking place through the dialogue of the characters.
“We worked very hard on the small details which are ultimately what built the story – the most important parts where the dialogues that gave the film its bearing. The style is that of observational Cinema that led us to document and collect a great deal of material that we then selected to construct the story.”

A moving and emotional film. How was it received in Italy?
“It was presented at the Venice Festival where it was accepted very well but until now, unfortunately, it has yet to be released. There’s hope that they’ll release it this summer, during August, in a reduced version, but it’s not yet certain.”

I read that there were also problems over the presentation in Rome from the city administration. What really happened?
“Maybe the Rome administration prefers to give space to other things. Unfortunately, in today’s age, politics is in everything. By that I don’t mean to say that a specific politician obstructed us. It’s the general climate where it’s easier or more convenient to talk about someone corrupt or about some government news rather than looking at the reality of what is taking place on the other side of the world. I don’t think there’s any diktat (dictate) from above – it’s just natural tendency.”

The film will be presented in Toronto on an important stage such as the Human Rights Watch Festival. How do you think it will be received?
“I hope well. Canadians have always been very attentive. I’ve already been to the Hot Docs festival not only with Jung but also with Colombia: diritto di resistenza, and Canada, in contrast to Italy, has always demonstrated an optimistic predisposition for reality-film.”
Back Home Tomorrow will screen on March 5th at 7pm at the Art Gallery of Ontario’S Jackman Hall, 317 Dundas Street West (McCaul Street entrance)

Publication Date: 2010-02-28
Story Location: http://www.tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=9896