VENICE, Sept 7, (RTRS): In someone else’s hands, “20 Cigarettes” could have become a gritty anti-war movie or an outright tearjerker. Instead, Aureliano Amadei opts for a middle ground for his autobiographical debut feature, which is surprisingly mainstream and sincere at the same time. Amadei was the only civilian survivor of the November 2003 suicide bombing at the Italian military headquarters in Nasiriyah, Iraq. He subsequently produced a book about the attack and the ensuing media storm. Now comes this film, which takes its name from the fact that chronic smoker Amadei hadn’t even gone through his first pack of cigarettes in Iraq before his life changed forever. Using mostly a handheld camera and a guitar-heavy soundtrack, the film shifts comfortably from comedy to drama without political rhetoric or trivializing its characters. It should easily become a hit in Italy, thanks also to a name cast headed by TV star Vinicio Marchioni as the director’s alter ego. Festival dates also loom.

The film’s first 10 minutes are overly earnest but in hindsight help establish the protagonist’s initial naivety. At 28, the self-proclaimed anarchist and anti-war demonstrator (Marchioni) was still living at home with his hippie mother (Orsetta de Rossi) when a family friend, director Stefano Rolla (Giorgio Colangeli), offered him a job on a film he was starting in Iraq.
Within days, Amadei lands in the Middle East. Desperate to light up, he’s sent to the “smoker’s area” — a tiny circle cordoned off by sandbags in the middle of the desert. Ingenuously convinced that the war is over and full of prejudice toward the soldiers, Amadei nevertheless makes two unexpected friends: soldiers Massimo Ficuciello (Alberto Basaluzzo) and Olla (Andrea Iaia).
The very next day they head out, with Rolla, to location scout in Nasiriyah.There is already a sense of danger in a quick pan of the lunar landscape around the group when it makes a pit stop. Seemingly devoid of all life, the vast brown land is still terribly menacing. As soon as they come to Nasiriyah, the tragedy occurs.

Amadei depicts his alter ego as a flawed non-hero — an ordinary man who reacts realistically in the face of horror. After the bomb goes off, his screams are almost more painful to bear than the images of his mangled body. Amadei spends a few days in an Iraqi hospital before being shipped home to Rome, where he undergoes more operations and is cared for by his best friend Claudia (Carolina Crescentini), who would eventually become his wife.
He is also visited in the hospital by a parade of journalists, politicians and military officials as he struggles to grasp what he has just been through. Fortunately, he does so with humor and a great sense for humanity that are both typically Roman and universally recognizable.
Marchioni effortlessly elicits laughs and tears. The supporting cast is outstanding, especially Basaluzzo, a true find.


A documentary premiering at the Venice film festival explores the trauma of US soldiers returning from war in Iraq and struggling to readjust to normal life, with little if any help from the military.
“Ward 54”, by Italian journalist Monica Maggioni, is named after the psychiatric wing of Walter Reed Hospital that treats army veterans in Washington DC.
Through the vivid recount of soldier Kristofer Goldsmith’s experience, and that of the family of a marine who killed himself upon his return from Iraq, it sheds light on an increasingly alarming phenomenon that is still a taboo subject.
Since 2001, the number of suicides among the US military has risen exponentially, and in 2009 it surpassed the number of war casualties, according to specialist weekly Army Times. An average of 18 veterans commit suicide every day.
“Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is something that, at least while I was in, no one ever wanted to admit that they had,” Goldsmith, who burst into tears as the documentary was warmly applauded in Venice, told Reuters in an interview.

“The military is a culture of toughness ... To be viewed as broken in any way, whether it be physically or mentally, is something that seems dishonorable.”
Sent to Iraq in 2005 when he as 20, Goldsmith’s task was to photograph and classify Iraqi corpses.
After being ordered to take close-up pictures of bodies in a Baghdad mass grave, something snapped inside him and he began having nightmares and flashbacks.
Back in his home country, he reached out for help but no one seemed to understand his growing desperation.
Diagnosed with severe depression, he asked to be discharged from the military, but was instead ordered to return to Iraq.
Stigmatised for attempting to take his own life, he is now fighting a legal battle to have an honourable discharge from the army — without which he will not be able to receive the grant that would allow him to go to university.

“If you are wounded in combat physically, you lose a leg, if you lose a hand, you take shrapnel, America seems to view you as a hero, whereas if you come back with invisible wounds, with emotional or mental scars, it’s something that American culture doesn’t seem to have the same reaction to,” he said.
Maggioni said that after spending years telling the stories of US soldiers on the frontline, she wanted to look at what happens when they return home.
“The problem is trying to be more and more attentive to the guys coming back, even if they pretend to have no problem at all because they are scared of the consequences,” she said.
“There are so many soldiers coming back from the frontline with psychological problems that dealing with all of these soldiers, dealing with those huge numbers is a problem, it’s difficult.”