Trauma, catastrophe, and contemporary conflicts: documentary strategies for the narration of violence

This essay is a direct result coming after an immersive and collaborative experience at the Documentary Summer School that took place in 2022 in Switzerland, a joint effort between the Università della Svizzera italiana and the 75th edition of the Locarno Film Festival. As such, it aims at collecting a few impressions about the state of the art of documentary production, particularly when concerned with modes of narrating violence. Besides the thematic sections that may group the films together, a few general points regarding different documental procedures will be teased out, to engage with scholarly research on themes such as trauma and catastrophe and thus give room to further academic exploration. The films analyzed are: The Hamlet Syndrome, The River is not a Border, It Is Night in America and Matter Out of Place.