Barbed Wire and Mandolins
1997 · 48m · Canada
Directed by Nicola Zavaglia
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, tender
Italian-Canadians recall being rounded up and held for years in internment camps such as Petawawa during the Second World War despite never being charged, yet look back without bitterness.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects internment docs to be angry, so Zavaglia just… doesn't do that—lets the subjects sit in their own contradictions instead, which is way more unsettling than predictable rage.
A formally restrained oral history that trusts the archive (voices, still images, sparse sound design) to hold weight without manipulation; the tenderness emerges from compositional discipline, not sentiment.
The deliberate choice to keep faces and names paired in the testimony—never cutting away, never dramatizing—becomes the film's entire argument about dignity and witness, and it costs almost nothing to do.