Notturno

12/4/2025

Though I found this to be a bit too rudderless for me, there are two quite differently compelling scenes in this documentary from Gianfranco Rosi that stood out for me. The first sees a young lad describing a wall of seemingly innocuous children’s sketches in his classroom that have altogether more sinister meaning, the second sees a group of men, clad in red, imprisoned in a fashion that reminded me of the conditions we might have provided for battery hens. The rest of the imagery here, accrued over some three years of filming, shows just what life in the “Caliphate” was like for communities, especially the Yazidi, across Syria, Kurdistan, Lebanon and parts of Iraq as the zealous and militaristic ISIS enforced it’s interpretation of Islamic law across a fairly expansive region of the Midd