Gianfranco Rosi spent years moving along the borders of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Kurdistan to make Notturno, a 2020 documentary that watches rather than explains.
What is Notturno about?
There is no narrator here and no single family to follow. Rosi's camera settles instead on a string of unconnected lives near the edges of conflict: soldiers on night patrol, a mother visiting the site where her son was killed, boys who fish at dawn, a psychiatric ward where patients rehearse a play about the violence around them. Locations are never named on screen, and the film moves between them with almost no dialogue, letting long, composed shots of landscape and light stand in for exposition. The effect is closer to a series of tableaux than a conventional story, built from years of access and patience rather than interviews or archival footage.
About the cast
Notturno has no credited cast in the traditional sense. Its subjects are the people Rosi filmed on location, appearing as themselves rather than as characters played by actors, which is part of why the director withholds their names and places within the film itself.
Context & significance
Rosi is known for documentaries that spend extended periods embedded in a single region before any editing begins, and Notturno continues that method after earlier work that took a similar patient approach to conflict-adjacent landscapes. The countries listed in its production span Germany, France, Iraq, Italy, Lebanon and Syria, reflecting both where it was shot and how it was financed. At 100 minutes, it favors accumulation over plot, asking viewers to sit with fragments rather than resolve them into a single narrative.
Watching Notturno on Ktime
Notturno streams on K-Time with a free account login, no purchase or trial required. The platform's Farsi-language interface makes it straightforward for Persian-speaking viewers to browse into a documentary like this one, even though the film itself carries no Persian dub or subtitles on K-Time.