30. Film Festival della Lessinia
Bosco Chiesanuova (Italia)
23 August - 1 September 2024

In Laos, bombs are an integral part of the environment and of daily life, remnants of the country's tragic past. From 1963 to 1974, during the Vietnam war, the US army dropped more than two million tons of explosives on its surface, the equivalent of five hundred thousand bombs. After forty years, the lives of the inhabitants are still marked by the radical mutations of the landscape still visible today, making it impossible to forget. Unexploded remnants of the war turn up daily, even in urban centres, creating a dimension of uncertainty and instability that affects the daily routines of the residents: their expressions, gestures, and relationships. The material of the bombs becomes part of daily life, taking on new forms and establishing a challenge in the way of understanding and elaborating the past and the traumas of the conflict, in a process that mixes metal and flesh, through the roots of the most bombed land in the history of man.

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  Paolo Barberi

  Paolo Barbieri is an anthropologist and documentarist. He began his audio-visual work at the Laboratorio di Antropologia Visuale at the Università Sapienza in Rome. In addition to teaching and research, he is one of the founders of the association of researchers and video makers Esplorare la Metropoli.

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  Riccardo Russo

  Riccardo Russo is a documentarist and co-founder in 2005 of Esplorare la Metropoli. For more than ten years he has devoted himself to recounting the indigenous world. He has worked in Africa, Asia, Oceania, South America and Europe and his films have been distributed by numerous television stations around the world and at important international festivals.