‘Lubo’ Review: A Slow-Moving Account of a Historical Outrage that Gets Lost on the Long Road to Redress
variety.comJessica Kiang 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, it also contains about three others of lesser value that are given equal, leaden weight.
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