ITALIA
VERSO EST
2008 – HDCAM – colore -63’
Direction: Laura Angiulli
Screenplay: Laura Angiulli
Cinematography: Cesare Accetta
Editing: Roberto Schiavone
Music: Rino Alfieri
Cast: Predrag Matvejevic’, Hatidza Mehmedovic’, Alessandra D’elia, Zehra Deovic’, Diana Höbel, Frederique Lolite, Minka Muftic’, Adis Oric’, Antonio Pennarella
Production: Il Teatro Soc. Coop. A.R.L.
SYNOPSIS
Verso est is the result of a long route.
At its centre Bosnia, with its cumbersome past and a present as much uncertain as controversial.
Three towns of that country – Sarajevo, Mostar, Srebrenica – different urges occurring in the contact with people and their past and present history.
Sarajevo is the capital town. The memory has shaped with contradictory results in the political organisation in force, and raises consequent opportunities of reflections and debate.
Mostar is all in the old bridge, symbol, but also slow beating heart of a political, social life that cannot warm the peripheral wings of the town, still shattered in the reality of Croatian and Muslim ghettos. And finally Srebrenica, the town of women, the town of sorrow. 12.000 dead persons (institutionally 8.372 are acknowledged, but practically the missing persons are 4.000 more), and every year on July 11th the big ceremony for the burial of these hundred of bodies that are still found, in new graves. The main character of the film s Hatidza Mehmedovic’comes from Srebrenica, and it was soon clear that she the only one, with her grave, haughty capacity of taking up mourning (in the genocide of 1995 she has lost her two only children, her husband, her brothers, her father) who could have been passed on the emotional burden strongly close to the affectivity of the author/director.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
The film has been suggested by the need of emotionally sharing the destiny of such places whose history is marked by dramatic events. We have chosen Bosnia because it was there that one of the bitterest wars has taken place. Because the theme of identity still gives way to expressions of conflicts. Because an evaluation of the fall back results of the war excursus, in culture and in economy, is already possible. For that reconstruction that finds it hard to be accomplished because the idea of future itself is seriously compromised. Because the private lives of individuals are in most cases definitely compromised, existences no more retrievable to the fullness of life. Because the rights of childhood must be respected and, for them, public education should spread values for the conception of an undivided world, of a single people. The presence of Hatidza Mahmedovic’ – president of Srebrenica’s mothers, seriously affected herself by the death of her two only children, of her husband, and of all her male relatives during the genocide, in Srebrenica in 1995 – portrays the truth of a tragedy of chilling vastness. Hatidza’s journey between memory and present days has allowed the development of an emotional route and, in spite of the harshness of the theme, the definition of a poetic discourse.
