Yes it's true, we already knew it. We children of Missini, to whom the fathers told that the foibe were not innocent karst fissures but dark craters of the land of Istria where the communists threw the Italians.
Norma Cossetto is the symbol of that martyrdom. We already knew his smiling face, that image which for years has been a sort of "holy card" consecrated to a censored memory, we knew the inhuman and ferocious fate that befell in the first days of October 1943 on the daughter of the mayor of Visinada. We already knew it but a movie, with the power of images, of the sonorous, of dialogues, It's a punch in the gut that you're not prepared for until it arrives.
The movie is Red Land-Rosso Istria, which has been in theaters since 15 November and will stay there for a few days. Saying it's an uncomfortable film doesn't even convey the idea. It's a film that breaks down a wall, as the director said Maximiliano Hernando Bruno. A film that they didn't want to relegate to the marginal space reserved for the Veneto Region at the Venice Film Festival. A film that 30-40 years ago it would not have been possible to achieve and which today is boycotted with the subtle weapon of silence and indifference.
Acknowledgment must be given Aldo Cazzullo to have written about it in the Corriere della Sera, but in response to a letter, getting by with a few hasty lines. Important but little visible axes. “I hope that many people go to see Red Land – wrote Cazzullo – We all owe a debt to the exiles of Istria and Dalmatia, and towards their descendants. I remember as if it were the first time that a classmate of mine at the Faculty of Law at the University of Turin, son of Istrian exiles, he told me about the foibe. I had 19 years, and I had never heard of it. The topic had not been broached at school. Not even on TV. Let's recognize it: it was a taboo for a long time. There has been modest talk about Tito for a long time, without writing clearly: communists. There was also a long silence about the cold and sometimes hostile welcome that the exiles received in the rest of Italy. As the most famous of them said, Nino Welcome: «They called us fascists; we were Italians"".
And let's get to the film, that we saw in a Roman cinema. Full room, absolute silence, repressed emotion. Not a breath, not a cough. Because it is a cruelly realistic film. A film that does not aim to water down responsibilities, a film where the Titos are bad and unpleasant and without mitigating circumstances (representation that cinema generally reserves for German soldiers). A film that does not attempt a pacifying reading by assigning to each person the responsibilities that history requires them to assign. Except in one place, when the Professor Ambrosini (Franco Nero) he speaks to the leader of the Slavic partisans and states that in wars everyone is a victim, fascists and communists, and victims would also be those who acted as turncoats after Mussolini's arrest. No. Pay for your choices, consistently, and trying to survive by floating is not the same. And it doesn't have the same ethical value. Ambrosini also states that Satan, evil, it is inherent to man, especially during wars. The tragedy of the foibe would therefore be the result of an ontological evil, philosophically understood. Here too we remain perplexed: there are ideologies that lead to crimes against humanity. One of them is communism.
But they are nuances, nuances that refer to an ideological debate that the film overcomes as an artistic product, and sophisticated workmanship. A film that reveals the reality of women who become prey to the brutal instincts of males at war, which highlights the helplessness of female victims, as raped, as mothers and sisters of raped daughters, the weak and trampled part of the war scenario, while men don't know what to do, they don't know how to act, after the about-face of 8 September. A disorientation, a sense of disintegration and anguish caused by a date that tore not only the army but the entire nation and which was doubly unfortunate for the Italians of Istria.
And then there is Norma, which is given back to us by the excellent interpretation of Selene Gandini, actress trained at the Albertazzi school. A guarantee for a more than demanding role. Norma is the sacrificial victim. Norma is a symbol, but it is also revenge given that after decades of oblivion its history is recovered by the seventh art. It's no coincidence that the director, on the day of the film's release in theaters, he wrote this dedication to her: “Smile Norma, we did it".
But Norma was not only a victim of the Slavic partisans, as seen in the film. The foibe were not only the work of the Tito people. The Italian partisans had a historically defined and now abundantly studied role. About it, we entrust the best comment to the words of Norma's sister, Licia Cossetto, disappeared in 2013 on the same day, il 5 October, in which 70 years earlier his sister was thrown alive into the foiba of Villa Surani: “With my sister Norma, I remember our father Giuseppe, he was also informed, with several of my other family members. Our only fault was that of being Italian and wanting to remain Italian. Norma could have saved herself if she had complied with the requests of her killers who proposed that she stay with them and become Croatian: which she bravely rejected, in light of his loyalty to his homeland. At that time, they took her to Antignana, they tied her to a table with wire hooked to her wrists and legs: there were about twenty of them, and they did with her what they wanted, torturing her and using repeated violence against her. Norma asked for water and called her mother, but no one was moved to pity. I won't be very diplomatic, unlike others. I have a poisoned tooth because the Italian State remembered us too late. On the other hand, it's our fault too, because the Istrian people are above all a hard-working and patient people, who chose the mass Exodus by rolling up their sleeves and getting to work: I myself taught for 42 years. In exile I was subjected to many wrongs, but even in Istria I had been imprisoned and beaten; luckily for me I found a schoolmate who took me away from our captors and brought me home, from where, that same night, I was able to escape with an aunt, reaching Trieste on foot with a march of 60 kilometres!
I have a bad tooth for many reasons but, as I repeat, first of all for the official silence that he covered for 60 years our tragedy. And then, I ask anyone who has gone to school if they have ever found a word about the terrible Istrian affair in a textbook: willful and programmed ignorance. Il 10 February 2006, when the President of the Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi gave me the Gold Medal of Valor granted in memory of Norma for her noble behavior in front of her torturers and for her refusal to collaborate with the enemy, and asked me if I was happy, I replied thanking him, but remembering that I had been waiting too long, without anyone ever remembering our information.
We need to inform better, also on the usual version according to which the Istrian martyrdom took place exclusively because of Tito's Slavic partisans. Actually, they immediately occupied some major center, the day after September 8th 1943, but in the smaller ones it was the local partisans – our fellow Italian citizens! – to let loose: they came at night to make us get up and shoot over the beds, ed aEven my sister's killers were fellow communists, which I remember very well one by one. They even have an INPS pension, including the survivors of the group that had tortured and informed Norma. Indeed, post-war Italian legislation established that it was sufficient to have served, even if for a few days, under Italy, to be entitled to a pension: which is all the more paradoxical, seen that to us, Instead, nothing was given. Personally, I received a real pittance only as compensation for the "abandoned" goods and, Therefore, a further mockery.
This is our story, so tragic that I don't feel like forgiving: of the rest, as has been said, «only the dead have the right to forgive, while the living have the duty to remember". This is the moral obligation that I leave as a legacy to my family and to our people.".
SOURCE: http://www.secoloditalia.it/2018/11/quel-gelo-nel-cinema-mentre-risuonano-le-urla-di-norma-cossetto/
I don't think we'll ever see it on the Mediaset networks, they always show Epeppone and Don Camillo.
The mediaset networks ? Ah,ah ! they follow, Usually, the leader's whorish ideology, I'm sorry about the word,but it is the correct one. He has always prided himself on making commercial TV, or more audience,the better; therefore lower the cultural level to attract the masses. Worse than that !
And now, even older, what does he do ? jokes ” witty” on women and continuous opposition to government actions, just to make Salvini pay. More shameful than that !