Valentina and the MUOSters (2024) ‘DOK Leipzig’ Movie Review: Plaintive, Resonant Re-Assertion of a Battered Ecology

In Francesca Scalisi’s “Valentina and the MUOSters,” we get an unflinching portrait of the town of Niscemi and its inhabitants who have to reckon with the impact of the mushrooming MUOS all around them. The town is a rich minefield for US and global political strategizing. It’s a key region, the repercussions of which fall heavily on those in it.

The twenty-six-year-old Valentina lives with her parents and is deeply connected to the natural reserve. But with the invasion of the antennas being planted all across the town, the natural landscape bears the mark of depredation. Many trees are singed. Her father laments not a single flower has sprouted the whole year. The community has strong ties to their land, the earth on which they walk. They can’t just sever themselves from that chunk of land, which carries so much of their history, familial and social, a web of interlocked memories, and move away. They may not have the resources on their side. Valentina finds her purpose, her existence, entire way of life disoriented and disrupted.

The film talks about the air we breathe and the direct relation between the environment and health. The government may use all its might to deny this equation, vesting blame on the individual instead. But the lie can’t stay concealed for long. The film looks at the problem at the root, eye to eye, and scans all its surrounding tangle of hazards. It gives credence, articulates, and legitimizes the forced distress of citizens whose home turf gets reappropriated and seized from them under the pretext of a military target.

They are not shoved off their land but the conditions turn so inhospitable it’s tough to continue leading a normal, uninterrupted life. There are all sorts of limitations and encroachments and patrol guards defining the boundaries of movement. A constant monitoring and supervision are in place. The protectiveness, safety, and being at ease at home have been wrenched away. No longer does the place feel like home.

Valentina and the MASters (2024) Francesca Scalisi — A still from *Valentina and the MUOSters* (2024)

The people have to negotiate and survive in the middle of the constant toxicity of the elements. Satellite antennas bear down on their lives. Valentina’s father has his health issues exacerbated by the antenna’s electromagnetic waves. The doctor confirms his apprehensions. But there’s no abatement. He is just one of the many casualties in the town that’s caught in the geopolitical crosshairs. There’s no escape or restitution. What the town can do is protest. One of the people pointedly sums it up that the government has always the money for funding wars but balks at helping out with food.

Scalisi foregrounds the reserved Valentina’s journey of having to re-orient her life. She insists she stayed back in Niscemi and did not look for opportunities outside so that she could be available for her parents and support them in whichever way she could. What unfurls is a slow, gradual, and considered trajectory of the woman yearning for a measure of autonomy, creating a life on her own terms. She doesn’t have the sureness to forge her individual path ahead but the fact that she realizes she has to envisage it and make those tentative steps is tremendous. But the film is more invested in evoking a place that’s falling apart, ecologically and as a safe home for a community.

There’s a lament, albeit in a subdued register, in the tone of the film. But can they afford to stay and feel pushed into helplessness? The film refuses to consign an all-is-lost wretchedness in its gaze on the people, investing them with agency resolve, and grit that expresses itself as much as it can within contained frameworks of existence. Overall, “Valentina and the MUOSters” is a quietly, solemnly reflective work.