Desert of the Tartars, The

Aroview: Italian drama set in a hostile East Asian desert, where a isolated Lieutenant defends an old, unmaintained border fortress while awaiting an attack by the nomadic Tartar warriors.

Post-neorealist director Valerio Zurlini employed an international cast and shot his film in the the giant dilapidated adobe fortress Arg-e Bam in Iran. An Italian communist who joined the resistance during WWII, his main preoccupations of war and death are explored here in a haunting, melancholic and existential story.

Based on the Dino Buzzati's 1940 novel The Tartar Steppe, which was an influence on authors as diverse as J. M. Coetzee and Yann Martel, and is considered a precursor to the literary style known as magic realism.

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