Directed by Aureliano Amadei
Aureliano Amadei (Vince Marchioni) is a chronic smoker who still lives at home with his mother. With a group of friends, the 28 year-old is an unemployed actor who is busy organising an anti-war demonstration and hoping to make a documentary. When a friend of his mother’s, Stefano Rolla (Giorgio Colangeli), offers him the opportunity to be an assistant director, he finds himself on a military plane heading towards the Middle East. Instead of protesting against the war in Iraq, he is actually in Iraq, looking for a place to smoke. This turns out to be a tiny circle, cordoned off by sandbags, in the middle of the desert – as there aren’t many places in the middle of a war zone where one can smoke.
Despite his preconceived prejudices, Amadei makes friends with a couple of the soldiers and the next day, they head off to scout filming locations. The soldiers are on high alert as they travel through the dust-filled landscape but when they reach the military compound, they unload their weapons. This is when tragedy strikes and Amadei records it with a shaky hand-held camera. Amadei was the only civilian survivor when a suicide bomber crashed into the compound of the Italian military headquarters in Nasiriyah, Iraq in November 2003.
After a few days in an Iraq hospital, he is returned to Rome for the long road to recovery. As he tries to come to terms with what he has been through, he is descended on by the media, politicians, military personnel and his good friend Claudia (Carolina Crescentini) who he later marries. Amadei expertly mixes horror and humour in this very personal anti-war film, which is just one of the 30 movies in the Italian Film Festival that screens at Cinema Paradiso and Luna on SX from 13 – 26 October.
Lezly Herbert
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