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Barbaric Land
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Barbaric Land
IDFA 2013

Barbaric Land

Pays barbare
Angela Ricci-Lucchi, Yervant Gianikian
France
2013
65 min
Dutch Premiere
Festival history
"Every era has its fascism." is the latest film in the militant oeuvre of artist couple Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi. It is a journey through history aimed at gaining a better understanding of our own era. They unearthed a wealth of material – from private archives and collections belonging to anonymous individuals – relating to Italian imperialism in the 1920s and 1930s. We see Mussolini visiting Libya, military parades in Italian cities, and Italian incursions into "primitive and barbaric" Ethiopia. A European gets a young African woman to display her breasts for the camera. There are shriveled corpses of people and cattle, all victims of a gas attack during the colonial war. Gianikian and Ricci-Lucchi have combined painful, horrific and disturbing images to evoke a hallucinatory trip in which the often timeworn photos and film excerpts are slowed, colored and re-photographed, and accompanied by music or half-spoken, half-sung commentary. By forcing our attention onto the material aspect of the photographic and cinematic image, the directors have raised questions about its role. Is it simply a witness, or an accomplice, or is it an instrument serving racism, demagoguery, the lust for power and the glorification of violence?
Credits
Screening copy
    Les Films d'Ici
    Les Films d'Ici