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Franz Rogowski further cemented his status as one of Europe’s most chameleonic and adventurous screen actors with his highwire turn this year as a narcissistic film director in Ira Sachs’ Passages, the agent of chaos at the center of a love triangle that spins out of control. The German actor again brings searing magnetism to Lubo, playing a member of midcentury Switzerland’s nomadic Yenish community, whose family and peaceful existence are torn from him by national authorities in what amounts to an ethnic cleansing campaign. Here, however, it’s the sprawling novelistic material that slips out of director Giorgio Diritti’s control.

Inspired by Mario Cavatore’s 2004 novel Il Seminatore but nudged far too often into melodrama in Diritti and Fredo Valla’s baggy screenplay, the film’s historical jumping-off point is eminently worthy of large-canvas treatment. But after a compelling first hour, the director can’t seem...

Clean, green Switzerland, land of chocolate, cuckoo clocks and direct democracy, is revealed to have a history of racial abuse as ugly as any other in Giorgio Diritti’s rolling epic Lubo, showing in competition at the Venice Film Festival. German actor Franz Rogowski plays the title character, a street performer and paterfamilias who is part of Switzerland’s community of Jenisch, a nomadic people originating in Germany. Lubo’s story is a dramatically terrible one – his wife is killed in a spat with heavy-handed police and his children are taken away, all while he is being marched off to serve time in the army – but it speaks to the truth.

Nobody knows exactly how many Jenisch children were taken from their families by Swiss authorities, but the current estimate is 2000. Lubo opens during the Second World War. Between the 1930s and 1973, when the practice was officially dropped, these children...

For around half of the entire last century, there was a semi-official policy enacted by the Swiss state to forcibly separate the children of “itinerant” parents from their families. The program, known as “Kinder der Landstrasse” (“Children of the Road”), was ostensibly designed for the protection of such children from the perils of vagrancy and criminality which the state imagined rife among the traveller population. In retrospect, of course, the practise, which was discontinued in the 1970s, has been revealed for what it actually was: an unjustifiably cruel abrogation of the human rights of various minority populations, among them the Yenish, the group to which Franz Rogowski’s Lubo Moser, the focus of Giorgio Diritti’s sprawling, overlong “Lubo,” belongs. Nobody could deny that such a historical injustice merits a moving and epic cinematic investigation. It’s just a shame that while the three-hour-long “Lubo” probably contains that very film,...

Franz Rogowski stars in the film which is based on real events.

Italy’s True Colours is launching pre-sales at the EFM of Giorgio Diritti’s Italian-Swiss co-production Lubo, starring Franz Rogowski, for which it has acquired worldwide rights.

Now in post, Lubo is set on the eve of Second World War. Rogowski stars as a young Caucasian man of nomadic ethnicity called to serve in the Swiss army to defend the border with Austria from the threat of the Nazi army who hears his children have been taken away by the authorities and his wife killed in the scuffle.

Franz Rogowski stars in the film which is based on real events.

Italy’s True Colours is launching pre-sales at the EFM of Giorgio Diritti’s Italian-Swiss production Lubo, starring Franz Rogowski, for which it has acquired worldwide rights.

Now in post, Lubo is set on the eve of Second World War, Rogowski stars as a young Caucasian man of nomadic ethnicity called to serve in the Swiss army to defend the border with Austria from the threat of the Nazi army who hears his children have been taken away by the authorities and his wife killed in the scuffle.