Abel Ferrara in Berlin Talks Ukraine War Documentary ‘Turn in the Wound,’ the Nature of Evil and Why the 2-Year-Old Conflict Isn’t ‘Yesterday’s News’
variety.comChristopher Vourlias Abel Ferrara has made a career out of staring unflinchingly into the abyss, interrogating man’s weakness and depravity and daring his audiences to look away.
Faced with the catastrophic violence of the war in Ukraine, however, which he chronicles in the Berlin-premiering documentary “Turn in the Wound,” even the iconoclastic director finds himself at a loss — for words, and for easy answers. “Why is the violence — that’s what it’s about,” Ferrara tells Variety. “Whether it’s there, whether it’s happening in Gaza and Israel — it’s happening all over the world.
It has happened, it is happening, and it’s going to happen, and the question is, Why?” Ferrara returns to Berlin four years after competing for the Golden Bear with “Siberia,” which starred Willem Dafoe in what Variety’s Guy Lodge described as a “beautiful, unhinged, sometimes hilarious trek into geographical and psychological wilderness.” The prolific filmmaker has hardly sat idly by in the interim, launching his COVID video diary “Sportin’ Life” at the Venice Film Festival that same year, appearing in Locarno in 2021 with his pandemic thriller “Zeros and Ones,” starring Ethan Hawke, and returning to the Lido in 2022 with “Padre Pio,” a religious biopic of the titular 20th-century saint starring Shia LaBeouf.
The Bronx native, who turns 73 this summer, is perhaps enjoying his most productive stretch since the nineties, when he released eight films in the span of nine years, including several career-defining descents into the lurid underbelly of his hometown, like “King of New York” and “Bad Lieutenant.” With “Turn in the Wound,” Ferrara — who moved to Rome shortly after the Sept.
Read more on variety.com
