Lubo

Lubo Moser is a travelling street performer, one of the Yenish people of Switzerland. In 1939 he is called up into the army. While he is gone the gendarmes come to his house and take his three children away; his wife is killed trying to stop them. Lubo cannot go back, and after that night he becomes somebody else entirely, assuming other identities and building a reckoning that will take years. Giorgio Diritti adapted Mario Cavatore's novel, and what it describes is real: a programme that ran in Switzerland from 1926 to 1973 in which the children of Yenish families were taken by a state-backed institution and placed elsewhere. All of it was legal under the law of the time. The state issued a formal apology years later. Franz Rogowski leads it, and the film competed at Venice.