I morti rimangono con la bocca aperta

A companion piece to Les Unwanted de Europa and Checkpoint Berlin, I morti rimangono con la bocca aperta extends Fabrizio Ferraro's project of retracing the historical footsteps of those fleeing persecution. On this leg of the trans-European pilgrimage, four resistance fighters make their way across the snow-capped Marsicani mountains in central Italy in 1944. The cold is biting, and on their protracted, painful flight from the Germans, the group meets a young woman they suspect is a spy. The film's temporal and geographical specificity notwithstanding, it gives little additional information about the men or their mission. Presented non-linearly, the drama is constantly minimised, scattered. The emphasis is instead on the in-between moments of waiting, smoking, glancing off-screen and marching to the funereal strains of the third movement of "Symphony No. 1" by Gustav Mahler, whose music was banned in Nazi Germany and to whom the film is dedicated. Alternatingly bleak and warm, Ferraro's austere film unfolds largely through images of dark figures cutting across a diffuse, wintry landscape, now huddling, now walking in a file. Whether these hunters in the snow will ever find a hearth, we won’t know, but made ‘in remembrance of the present’, the film isn't without a message of hope for our politically beleaguered times: that liberation may be around the corner. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)