For his documentary Notturno, Italian director Gianfranco Rosi did the unthinkable—spend most of his time in the field without a camera.“I remember my producer saying, ‘Are you crazy? …If something important happens you’re going to miss it!’” he recalls at Deadline’s Contenders Documentary awards-season event, adding with a laugh, “I said, ‘My life is about missing things constantly as a filmmaker.’ ”But to depict life in the Middle East in a new way—his aim in Notturno—Rosi felt it essential to explore first, meeting people who live within a background of war along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon.“I wanted [Notturno] to be a film of encounter,” he explains. “The people I met were completely accidental…I did months,
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