I've met a handful of war veterans throughout my life and, though none of them (to my knowledge) sustained permanent injuries in combat, I've heard about plenty of other soldiers they fought with who weren't as fortunate. Even after a war ends, its impact on those who survived it will still be felt for years to come. And for the soldiers depicted in this film, throughout the remainder of their lives. Throughout the film, we see numerous soldiers with missing limbs, missing eyeballs, and deformed facial features. Though it's not an easy watch, my main takeaway was how it found poetry amidst the grotesqueness. While the footage of the soldiers and children is obviously far from uplifting, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi illustrate the ways those people can go through surgery to either reconstruct or replace what they lost and make the best with what body parts they have left, even if they can't be made whole again. One particularly powerful sequence was a montage of close ups of various soldier's deformed faces. This sequence really tested my endurance as, not only were the deformities quite graphic to look at, but each face was focused on for an uncomfortably long time. The film followed up on this though with various close ups of soldiers who presumably went through facial reconstruction surgery as they hold up a plaster of what they originally looked like. Their scars are still visible if you look closely, but given the prior montage, this one comes as a relief. Other powerful sequences included characters performing everyday tasks, like a farmer tending to his crops with a robotic arm, while another powerful sequence showed a close up of a man having a fake eye put in place of a disfigured eye. After his procedure, I honestly couldn't tell the difference between his real and fake eye at all. I finished the film over an hour ago, yet I'm still trying to make sense of the emotions it made me feel. In spite of the constant barrage of graphic injuries onscreen, it strangely felt hopeful. The people onscreen lost so much in the war, yet the worst is over for them and things will start to look up. If I had to nitpick something, this might've been better had Stan Brakhage directed it. Some of the music choices seemed jarring and unnecessary. This is the kind of film where the emotional resonance of the imagery speaks for itself, so I don't think it needed a soundtrack. Aside from this, however, I quite enjoyed this film and may return to it sometime in the future.
