1941. An Italian soldier is sent to the Ukrainian front. The Fascist Italian army is allied with the Nazi German machine, and victory seems close, but the Soviet resistance is very strong. Winter arrives, and dead, prisoners, and deserters come with it. The immense steppe swept by snowstorm seems to be inhabited by ghosts.

Il varco - Once More Unto the breach is a work of fiction made with both official and amateur archive material. It is the subjective account of a soldier involved in the disastrous Italian campaign in Russia during World War II.
As we can read in the director’s notes, to create the story of a man drifted in the ‘hearth of darkness’ of war, directors Federico Ferrone and Michel Manzolini drawn upon imaginary apparently different and distant from each other: adventure novel, Russian folk and fairy tales, guilty conscience of Fascist Italy colonialism, diaries and memories by Italian soldiers in the Eastern Front.
Ferrone and Manzolini – maybe for first, made a work of fiction with private and public audiovisual documents of disparate origin merging them into a unique subjective point of view, and the narrative voice is also stream of consciousness.
The film, which premiered at the 76th Venice International Film Festival, is now in competition at DocsBarcelona Festival, in the section What the Doc, dedicated to the most innovative documentaries on the international scene. Only two Italian films are presented in this edition of the Festival, which take place online.

Available on the Festival’s platform (exclusively in Spain).

trailer
Facebook
website