The story of reporter Domenico Quirico is the closing event of Venice Days

The closing night film for the 13th edition of Venice Days is The War Within by Paola Piacenza, a documentary interview that centers around the journalist and war correspondent Domenico Quirico.

A reporter for La Stampa and the last great war correspondent in circulation, Quirico was taken hostage in Syria on April 8, 2013 and freed after 152 days of captivity. In this film he re-evokes his entire career spent collecting fragments of other people's lives, and journeys back to that cell in which the loss of his liberty and dignity, for the first time, forced him to share the same fate as the people he had written about for years. In another first, this journalist, who had never before worked with film directors or photographers, has now agreed to share his own experience in the field, along the Russian-Ukrainian front, in this documentary. It's a journey that would take him to other fronts as well, and inevitably to "the place where it all began and where it all ended," Syria, where he was held hostage, because "you're not going home; you're going back there."

"Words and actions," says filmmaker Paola Piacenza, "play off each other in the film: the modus operandi of the reporter in the field reveals how, over the years, his gaze has taken shape and been drawn to events and the players who fashion those events or dominate them. Including himself and his own existential journey in the final picture."

"We took a firm stance in placing Paola Piacenza's fascinating investigation at the close of Venice Days," says the sidebar's director, Giorgio Gosetti. "We open with a story out of the heart of Syria and close with another look at that same land. "It's a first-hand account that is a perfect fit for the plot of The War Show and develops that film's dramatic premise. A sign of the times, surely, but also further proof of the central importance of documentary filmmaking on the world scene."

The War Within is a film by Paola Piacenza, produced by Frenesy Film (Luca Guadagnino) in collaboration with Rai Cinema, and, being deemed of cultural interest, with the support of the Ministry of Culture (MiBACT) and the Doc Film Fund of the Torino Piemonte Film Commission. The documentary will be screened out of competition on Saturday, September 10, as the closing film of Venice Days 2016.