By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats
Director: Alberto Vendemmiati | Fabrizio Lazzaretti
Country: italy
Year: 2002
Running time: 114
IMDB: http://us.imdb.com/Details?0280801
Diane says: “JUNG is a cinema-verité docu about an Italian doctor, British nurse, and Italian journalist working to set up a hospital for war victims in northern Afghanistan. I had the same reaction as I did to NO MAN’S LAND: lukewarm. Am I being resistant to the reality of war? Director Fabrizio Lazzaretti shows two hours of negotiating, surgery, warfare. The irony of men who have just had their limbs amputated, lying in their hospital pajamas and singing songs about going out to kill the Taliban is so strong that it just about makes me numb.
The most affecting segments focus on a man whose family tries to get him treatment as a war victim, but actually half of his face is missing not from a mine, but from melanoma. The hospital staff decide to take him in as a terminal patient anyway, and expend a lot of their precious time ministering to him. Another strong scene is a very short one: the surgery staff is sitting around a table bleary-eyed, completely done in after hours upon hours of operating on the war wounded. The doctor drops a cigarette butt into a glass, and says, ‘Sorry for the noise.'” 3 cats