Film Commission Torino Piemonte

In May 1940 to escape from the Fascist Racial Laws, my parents managed to leave Turin and Italy, and get on the last passenger ship going to America. The Producer, Robert Levi, who remained in Italy with his family, also suffered the consequences of the racial laws until a providential flight into Switzerland. The film therefore, stems from a profound need to know about, understand and make known. Also because those events, though in different ways, come to repeat themselves, and to threaten our future. We have the duty to mobilize ourselves and seek to prevent that occurring. Until 1935 in Italy, racism in Italy was almost inexistent, and fascism in the twenty years of its dictatorship, was able to inoculate in our society, a virus which in subterranean ways has put down roots, and continues to proliferate. With the occasion of the anniversary of the Promulgation of the Racial Laws, the film therefore would seek to deepen the understanding of what happened. To reflect on how they were conceived, received, and what were their consequences. With the help of historians (Italians and foreigners) of world renown as well as academics and distinguished experts, we will try, in a modern and involving language to analyze the facts, focusing importance also on little known and rare documents and archive materials.  The official voice of the “Great Story” will intertwine with the “micro-stories” of personal accounts from witnesses who for the first time have overcome emotional blocks to recount their experiences and their memories. The film desires in fact to be not only a historic and didactic in depth consideration, but above all an opportunity for the emotional involvement of the audience to stimulate reflection and conscience. Using animation, the effectiveness of digital effects, and the sensibility of well known actors who will read the cold administrative provisions, the delirious proclamations and the harrowing pages of diaries and letters, we wish that our words should become also “images” and emotions to touch the sensitivity of the viewer, and have him overcome prejudices and indifference.
I don’t believe that it only a moral need which pushes me to desire to recount the period of the Racial Laws, neither “private necessity” of knowing how my parents and their religious fraternity lived, and what they suffered, neither a generic urgency that more should be unveiled on this subject, but above all a conviction that with direct language, one should reawaken the interest and curiosity of the coming generation and young people.

Giorgio Treves