Capo Teulada in Sardinia. A woman collects the washed clothes, lays on a terrace. Some soldiers withdraw from laundry washed and ironed uniforms. In Capo Teulada there is a military polygon. Exercises that pollute and make the city tremble. Silent militaries live this land as a battlefield. A lawyer helps M. to embark on a legal path that will be part of a wider research into the cause of deaths due to cancer, attributable to military exercises.
A deafening silence, a beautiful and terrible landscape at the same time. The Wash is a documentary of denunciation with an original contemplative look; twenty intense minutes, which immerse the viewer in the territory, in the environment and in its history, suggesting the complaint and not riding it. Water and silence, life and destruction.
After the Second World War, NATO created a large-scale military exercise zone at Capo Teulada. It is possible that the members of the family who own the laundry have become ill because of the toxic substances present in the military uniforms that they washed and handled every day for years. The family consisted of six people, five of whom were affected by malignancy or thyroid dysfunction, the only member that did not contract diseases is the one living in Brazil. At the time of filming, the Cagliari prosecutor’s office had opened an investigation about the war pollution and set up a commission of inquiry for suspected deaths from soldiers, civilians and animals.
DECLARATION OF THE DIRECTOR
The desire to realize The Wash came from a personal meeting with the people and the places of the story narrated.
Is absurd to be killed by empty uniforms without soldiers inside. The act of filming and telling this history was very painful at first.
Filming had to look for the deepest feelings, the sufferings, the hopes. In addition a complex assembly work in counterpoint intends to return a narrative articulation between reconstruction and spectacular landscapes, between waste and temporal overlap.
There is also the desire to give a cynical return to the devastating impact that polygons have in Sardinia, by resorting to a montage that unites parades, exercises, statements by the Chief of Staff around the village.
In this film more than for others I opened myself to the advice of friends, critics and colleagues.
