B-52

On this occasion, our programme on flight is taken to the Navarra Film Library to show the B side of aviation: the air can be enjoyed from the sky, the dream of connecting distances can be fulfilled, feeling like a bird… but this command can also be used for war, espionage and other evils of the human being developed from the skies. The great German documentary maker, Harmut Bitomsky, made a credible portrait of one of these monsters of the sky in this film at the end of the 1990s, the mythical B52 bomber, which is a portrait of North America’s command of the sky in our century. In his peculiar style, the director from Bremen does not stay in the air and also seeks the other side on earth. Bitomsky gives the voice to the American pilot who launched 2,250 tonnes of bombs and then interviews the Vietnamese man who found his wife cut into two in his demolished house. The plane’s black box is fully stripped, from Palomares, which is not far from us, to Vietnam, Kosovo and Iraq… until the historic plane is turned into scrap that is recycled in diving equipment or in pieces of art that are cast into columns for an altar. The film, which was premiered in Berlin in 2001, is an example of how to pilot a documentary and the presence of the director to debate it will help: Harmut Bitomsky, film essayist, author of 40 documentaries and editor of the prestigious magazine, Filmkritik, for a decade.