Hadamo

World War I, on the Italian front: an outpost high in the mountains, just a few metres from the enemy trenches, “so close we could almost hear them breathing”. All around, there is nothing but snow and silence, and in the Italian trenches there is cold, fear, fatigue, resignation and the absurd orders that arrive by telephone from some far-away desk, sending soldiers toward a pointless suicide. Loosely based on Federico De Roberto’s La paura, Ermanno Olmi’s last film is a melancholy ballad filmed entirely on the Asiago high plains, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the Great War. The trench is like a tomb of the dead, but up there, where thousands of corpses are scattered, “the cows will return to graze, the meadows will grow back, and all will be forgotten”.