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Abel Ferrara Talks Ukraine War Documentary ‘Turn in the Wound,’ the Nature of Evil and Why the Conflict Isn’t ‘Yesterday’s News’
Premiering out of competition at the Berlin Film Festival, the movie pairs the director's war footage with a musical performance by Patti Smith.
The compulsion to bear witness is what brought Ferrara to Ukraine just months after the Russian invasion in February 2022, arriving that summer with a small crew that included cameramen Emmanuel Gras and Sean Price Williams and long-time collaborator Phil Neilson. The director’s most striking choice in “Turn in the Wound” is to pair his interviews and war footage with a performance by singer, songwriter and poet Patti Smith, who combines her own lyrics and poetry with texts from writers including Antonin Artaud, René Daumal and Arthur Rimbaud (a line from whose poem, “Memory,” lends the film its title). The filmmaker is the first to admit that he has no answers, though he reiterates his conviction in the power of the moving image, and the ability of cinema to get “to another understanding — something that you can’t get to any other way.” While his movie’s reckoning with the war in Ukraine offers no easy explanation for the violence and death, Ferrara remains determined in his search for grace.
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