After being presented in the Sala Nassirya of the Senate the film Red Land Rosso Istria, which recalls through the martyrdom of Norma Cossetto the atrocious and unprecedented violence suffered by the populations of’ Istria after the armistice of 1943 arrives in a few cinemas in the country. In Naples, third largest city in Italy, no cinema or multi-theater has yet decided to offer viewing of this film to the public, which cannot yet be seen, in many Northern cities, of the center and the South, of the country as several readers of the blog point out to me. Even the undersigned, still hasn't been able to see the film. For this reason I asked my colleague Roberta Di Casimirro for a review of the film, which I gladly propose to you.
I saw a movie last night, “Red Land”… In Italian “Red Istria”… it is an Italian story… a page of Italian history… buried under the dusty tomes of ideological and cultural conformism, of the historical vulgate… and I recommend everyone to see it… dal 15 November at the cinema… It lasts just under a few hours…
The official synopsis of the film says:
“We are in September of 1943, in the days when chaos breaks out in the war-torn Italian territories: Marshal Badoglio, head of the Italian government, he requests and obtains an armistice from the Anglo-Americans and together with the King he flees from Rome, leaving Italy in disarray.
The army no longer knows who is the enemy and who is the ally.
The drama turns into a tragedy for the soldiers abandoned to themselves in the theaters of war but also and above all for the Istrian civilian populations, Fiumane, Julians and Dalmatians, who find themselves facing a new enemy: Tito's partisans advancing into those lands, driven by an anti-Italian fury. In this dramatic historical context, the figure of Norma Cossetto will be highlighted, young Istrian student, graduate student at the University of Padua, barbarically raped and killed by Tito's partisans, for the sole fault of being Italian.”
A good movie, well acted, excellent actors… entered perfectly into the story… net of some small authorial freedom… which however adds nothing to or subtracts from the reconstruction… it is well built, excellently assembled, with very effective flashbacks… and strong reconstructions… rape, with a play of light and shadow that makes it seem infinite… the drama of the shadows that extends the nightmare of rape to all women, moving away from the specific Cossetto affair to reach all the victims, for the foiba… what for many years was defined as the karst cavea, to become the mass grave of the Italians of Istria and Dalmatia, the leap into the dark… inside the film there is the betrayal of the Italians, the betrayal of friendship, of the infamy and cowardice of which many Italians, accomplices of the Titos, they got stained… the ferocity, violence and hatred… the ethnic cleansing of a territory… a glimpse into the murky world of historical reconstruction… conformist.
Last night the film seemed very slow to me at times… I thought about French cinema… the silences, the images and the music… some scenes seemed to be endless, but this cold morning I reflected on the time of pain and suffering… and indeed the time of fear of suffering, of sacrifice and pain… it's long, it seems infinite to us, that time never passes… it is there motionless… that slow and suggestive anguish passes through the bones to reach the brain in a dull pain that projects us into the story.
a raw film, realistic… during the screening in the theater a gentleman felt ill… an exile… luckily nothing serious, but some film sequences for those who have experienced first hand, certain scenes have probably reopened the never healed wounds of a suffering and violence never recognized…
Go and see it, deserve!!!
SOURCE: http://www.fascinazione.info/2018/11/con-rosso-istria-il-regista-argentino.html?m=1
I read the terrible story of Norma Cossetto, are “History of the Civil War” in G. Pisanò, great journalist and writer, which gave the start to write certain truths to the subsequent Pansa. When the RSI soldiers reconquered the area, they caught those responsible for the rape and forced two of them to “keep watch” the martyred body, brought to the surface and placed in the mortuary. It seems that the two beastmen went out crazy the next morning. Told in the film ?