Film Commission Torino Piemonte

We arrived in Mosul a few weeks after the end of the war of liberation from Isis. We had been to war zones before, but such devastation was out of any previous experience. Only cinematic memory could hold a candle to it: the beginning of Rossellini's 'Germania Anno Zero', Berlin transformed by bombing into a shapeless pile of fire-blackened rubble. We wandered into this desolate territory to see what it contained. There we met Ghadeer for the first time, a young journalist who had just returned from Europe to set up a free radio station in his country. Don't Come Back is the story of a return. Following a positive story of struggle towards a better future can be an even more powerful form of denunciation than telling stories of suffering. Examples of this kind place the emphasis on what is missing and what interferes with the success of the protagonist's efforts. Ghadeer and his group believe in the formation of civic consciousness through the use of media and this seems to us to be the highest function of cinema.