By Andrea Chase

“The night scares me,” says a refugee girl in Gianfrano Rosi’s elegiac documentary, NOTTURNO. Traumatized by the violence she witnessed at the hands of ISIS, she uses a child’s sing-song voice to describe the torture and murders she saw. Rosi may have had that in mind when he named his film, which places the humanity affected by political turmoil in the Middle East at the forefront. He certainly knows where to place the blame for that turmoil. The only context he provides is at the start with a brief history of the fall of the Ottoman Empire after centuries of rule in the region, the destabilizing effects of the resulting power vacuum remain to this day.
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