Two tragedies at sea made global headlines in June: the sinking off Greece’s coast of a fishing boat smuggling migrants, killing at least 82 and leaving hundreds missing, and the implosion of the submersible Titan while transporting five high-paying passengers to tour the Titanic’s wreck. The difference in rescue responses and allocated resources was vast: we soon knew a lot of biographical information about the Titan crew of businessmen and explorers, but the refugees remained faceless, anonymous numbers, leading some to ask whether states consider some lives more valuable than others. Pure Unknown, the feature debut of writer and editor Valentina Cicogna in co-direction with Mattia Colombo (whose previous documentaries include Il Posto (2022), on economic desperation among Italian nurses) was made before these latest catastrophes. But the film, which screens in the Horizons section at Karlovy Vary after premiering at Visions du Reel, could not be more poignant in contextualising what is at stake in state responses to such disasters. Politically engaged festivals should snap up this observational doc, which is as sensitive as it is urgent and timely in calling out the failure of nations of the European Union to act together to ensure the right of the deceased to a name.
We follow the day-to-day work of Milan-based professor Cristina Cattaneo, who runs Italy’s first forensic anthropology lab, using science to help solve crimes and missing person cases. She actively campaigns for changes to EU laws to make it easier to identify the unnamed human remains found every year — the “pure unknown,” as she calls them — and afford them the dignity of a proper burial. This is a humanitarian issue that pertains just as much to the living, as without identification surviving relatives are left with the debilitating mental health strain of “ambiguous loss,” when they do not know the fate of their missing loved ones. Cattaneo trains students in different ways to gather data to match bodies with missing persons. There is a haunting sadness to details. We scrutinise a butterfly tattoo on an unidentified corpse, so quirkily specific, yet now so asunder from any personality or backstory it had once reflected.
One cold case, full of sorrow, is representative of lives on the margins, and individuals that can disappear so anonymously because wider society cares very little for their welfare and refuses any responsibility for their fates. Mbaresa Kumbria was an Albanian woman who was nineteen years old when she fell off her family’s radar in 1996, after she was forced into the Italian sex trade. She had stayed missing ever since, despite her sister’s best efforts to locate her. Improvements to DNA technology mean Cattaneo and her colleagues are finally able to identify her remains, so that her sister can see and claim them, in emotional scenes of grief and closure. Meanwhile, thousands of bodies still lie buried without names in European cemeteries. Cattaneo also works on the remains of a fourth-century Christian saint — and the brocaded luxuriance bestowed upon the body by the Church provides a stark contrast.
When a Libyan fishing boat sank near Sicily in 2015, overcrowded with refugees trying to reach Europe, and was raised from the seabed, Cattaneo was enlisted to help with the dead. The vessel became an art installation, displayed at the Venice Biennale as a symbol of the immigration crisis. The liberal elite could indulge their empathy at the exhibition and feel good about it — but this spectacle of support did not make the fight to identify the bodies any less uphill. The 250 euros per skull it costs for a DNA test, out of reach for impoverished families, is more than governments, under no legal obligation and prioritising living arrivals, wanted to spend. Cattaneo addresses the EU Parliament in the hope of changing attitudes, and initiating a Europe-wide database for cross-referencing the data of the missing and the “pure unknown.”
Cattaneo, motivated by a justice-seeking streak, is a sympathetic protagonist. We feel the wells of emotion along with her that quietly break through her focused and matter-of-fact, professional demeanour. There is a persuasive, campaigning dimension to this doc, but it is never didactic or drily overloaded with data. Instead, it is a plea for basic humanity, as it individualises “pure unknowns” and gives their lives (and deaths) weight and worth back — even if they are yet to have their names returned to them, and their connection back to the living world restored.
Directors, screenwriters: Valentina Cicogna, Mattia Colombo
Producers: Sebastiano Luca Insinga, Chiara Nicoletti
Editor: Valentina Cicogna
Cinematography: Jacopo Loiodice
Sound: Simone Paolo Olivero, Paolo Benvenuti
Production companies: Jump Cut (Italy), Amka Films Productions (Switzerland), Sisyfos Production (Sweden), RSI (Switzerland)
Sales: Deckert Distribution
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Horizons)
In English, Italian
93 minutes
