Quaranta Giorni (Forty Days) Movie Review:


Two Italian families are part of an exchange scheme where orphan kids are taken from their homes in the Chernobyl area and placed with families for 40 days. We follow the families and the kids through this time, always questioning whether this is right or wrong.

Thankfully it’s not a simple early evening feel good about yourself documentary, instead making the viewer have to think and make up their own judgements about the benefits or not of the scheme.

And therein lies the real meat of the film. Is this trip of any benefit to the kids? They have no one at home, or their parents have severe problems. They are ripped from their orphanage and placed in a strange country where even communicating to the host family is going to be nigh on impossible, as they don’t even speak Russian.
It really does question the motives of the people fostering, are they doing it for their own western interests? Is it self-aggrandizement? Do they really care about the kids?
Do they think that people in the western world are better than these abandoned kids?

The film really hits home at the end when the trip adviser from Russia is asked what her thoughts are - “they don’t need saviours, to be friends is ok.” And if that’s the message of this 58min documentary then I, for one, can accept that.

Quaranta Giorni is accompanied by a 23 minute near silent documentary that shows a rural Belarus community. Although there is negligible dialogue it does show in stark relief how some parts of the world still exist in a near middle ages fashion.

Gary Gray

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