Alessandra Ferrini

Sight Unseen (2019)

Omar al-Mukhtar (1885-1931) was the leader of the resistance against the Italian occupation of Libya. He became the symbol of the Libyan people’s resilience and his legacy was exploited by the Gaddafi regime. Sight Unseen explores the concealment and appropriation of the memory and documentation of Mukhtar’s final days: his capture, trial and spectacularised state killing. Based on visual and material culture that has been subject to either manipulation or obfuscation in Italy, the film focuses on the most complete series of images of Mukhtar's capture and execution, which at the time of filming was legally unpublishable. The voice and hands of historian Alessandro Volterra show and describe these images to the camera, although these are never fully revealed: barely discernible, they are faded to black, blurred, shown for just an instant. Conveying the concealment and marginalisation of these images (and their legal ban), the film interweaves other documents and artefacts attesting to the carefully orchestrated politics of visibility and invisibility that shape the memory of colonial violence in Italy: Mukhtar’s contested glasses; the movie Lion of the Desert; extracts from Mukhtar's trial; and Monumento al Carabiniere, a 1933 memorial to the Italian armed forces in Turin.