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Rating: The Cinema that Tells Real Life.
These days, I prefer documentaries over films. I prefer REAL life to the fictionalized, scripted, and carefully crafted life by Hollywood Studios. I prefer stories of REAL events and people, extraordinary, living like us and who, in their lives, have “dared” what many of us, out of cowardice, fear or lack of conviction, would never do.
It is with this spirit that I watched a few days ago the documentary “Clown in Kabul” from 2002, which talks about the adventures of the famous doctor/clown Patch Adams who, with a small group of doctors and various volunteers, set off for Kabul to provide assistance and medical care to the children of those territories devastated by too many wars.
This strange “armed brigade” paused in various field hospitals and impromptu medical care sites of different humanitarian organizations (from Gino Strada's Emergency to the Italian Red Cross) and, filmed day and night by various TV crews, they created a documentary really moving and often shocking in its disarming content for the humanity and desperation of certain faces and truly unbearable situations.
With a careful and astute direction by two Italians (Enzo Balestrieri and Stefano Moser) in their debut behind the camera, and with the artistic supervision of Ettore Scola, we are led to “live”, with the protagonists playing themselves, their own emotions, from the departure from Rome to Kabul and their respective journeys inside a country now ravaged by a war without end, now embedded in the cultural fabric of those peoples.
No pity and no attempt to “romanticize anything”: the slicing work of the cameras, as sharp as a scalpel, delves into the heart of the lives of desperate people crowding hospital rooms, children without limbs, mothers with no more tears for the loss of one or more children, elderly now without hope, among shocked looks at seeing this strange group of Westerners appearing with clown-painted faces, eliciting timid smiles from faces that gradually relax. A kind of reaction by contrast: on one side War and on the other the Clowns!. Smiles as a cure, exchanged for other smiles in an infectious spread of tender hilarity right where there is LITTLE to laugh about in some truly moving and touching sequences as rarely cinema manages to show us.
No tricks, no special effects here, no beautiful photography... only the bare and raw reality and the skilled and discreet eye of a camera, focused on capturing reflections of warmth long absent in these places, that infects everyone... including the doctors themselves who at times cannot hold back their tears, involving even us absent spectators, in this “inner scream” of helplessness and anger that turns on more than one occasion into bitter tears.
The good thing is that all the proceeds from the initiative really went to the organizations in Afghanistan involved in the film, and this can only please us.
A dry, tough, pitiless film (presented as a Special Event at the 59th Venice Film Festival in 2002) that knows how to gift us with glimpses of “pure poetry” neither contrived nor reconstructed on the drawing board to please any audience, and which, moreover, through the entire earnings, had the gift of genuinely doing good for someone who is BEYOND the world but has dreams, ideals, and hopes quite similar to ours and who for years, daily, fights for a wooden limb, a hunk of bread, or a specific vaccine (for us available at any pharmacy).
These types of films, as I have said before in other contexts, should, in my opinion, be shown in schools, to realize what kind of privileges we Europeans have, being born a few thousand kilometers this way rather than the other.
It seems silly but it should be kept in mind every now and then…
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