THE FORGOTTEN FRONT, ON THE FRONT LINE WITH TESTIMONIES, STORIES, IMAGES NEVER SEEN BEFORE
Difficult to isolate the turning point of a life. But for Giovanni Palmieri or Irma Bandiera, Luciano Bergonzini or Ada Zucchelli begins along the 'Gothic line', the German defensive line that exploited the roughness of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines in an attempt to slow down the advance of the Anglo-Americans from south to north . September 8, 1943 is the day they decided to do something, the day they chose the Resistance.
Paolo Soglia and Lorenzo K. Stanzani retrace the forgotten frontof the title, a military (and chronological) director behind which the Germans sheltered and concentrated a multi-ethnic army, which counted divisions and brigades from all over the world alongside the canonical British and American departments. But it is behind the German forces deployed along the Gothic line that their gaze is concentrated, transforming a military history into a personal experience, a defensive front in the place of transition between civil and partisan life.
If the offensive stopped fifteen kilometers from Bologna, the Americans decided that the main effort to defeat Germany should be made in France, the documentary by Soglia e Stanzani 'enters' in Bologna to witness the existential dimension of young men and young women who affirmed the refusal of occupation and fascism with military and civil actions.
Marzia Gandolfi, MYmovies.it
To tell the singularity of the Bolognese Resistance, because in Bologna the war was longer and harsher, because the joint oppression of the Nazis and the fascists of the Social Republic was more fierce and desperate than elsewhere.
On the eve of an inevitable debacle, fascists and Nazis clung to the last resources and indulged in unnecessarily brutal, barbaric, fatal actions that did not respond to any war but only to the congenital bestiality of their conscience. Left alone in the face of Nazi-fascist barbarism and at the beginning of the harsh winter of 1944, many men and many women chose the clandestine struggle.
Although Fascist education had raised them with martial images and precepts, most of them had no idea what the violence of war could be. But that violence constituted a key moment in their existence, a formative and foundational rupture experience. Shootings, despoiling, hangings, torture, massacres, physical and moral miseries did not weaken their courage. Collected in an irregular 'army', although often structured in divisions and commands, the freedom volunteers represented a fighting reality in which the relationship with the territory was fundamental, because only with the support of the civilian population, the resisters could move and hide in a busy city.
The Forgotten Front - The Resistance in Bologna'marks' the places where women and men active in the partisan movement threw grenades, carried out acts of unarmed opposition or executions on the street, demonstrated, protested, offered assistance, risked and often paid with life their will to change the world of tomorrow. A tomorrow that would come with the resumption of the Allied offensive on April 9, 1945 and the liberation of Bologna on April 21.
Seventy-five years after the documentary by Soglia and Stanzanithe faces of the partisans re-emerge under the grain of old films, unpublished archival materials where their sacrifice has never been more tangible, more tragic. Hunters of lost images, who marry the vocation of three Bolognese institutions in the service of the cause, Cineteca (spectacular device), laboratory (storage device) and university (theoretical device), the directors not only give readability to photographs and frames but recover internal polarity.
Paolo Soglia and Lorenzo K. Stanzani retrace the forgotten frontof the title, a military (and chronological) director behind which the Germans sheltered and concentrated a multi-ethnic army, which counted divisions and brigades from all over the world alongside the canonical British and American departments. But it is behind the German forces deployed along the Gothic line that their gaze is concentrated, transforming a military history into a personal experience, a defensive front in the place of transition between civil and partisan life.
If the offensive stopped fifteen kilometers from Bologna, the Americans decided that the main effort to defeat Germany should be made in France, the documentary by Soglia e Stanzani 'enters' in Bologna to witness the existential dimension of young men and young women who affirmed the refusal of occupation and fascism with military and civil actions.
Marzia Gandolfi, MYmovies.it
To tell the singularity of the Bolognese Resistance, because in Bologna the war was longer and harsher, because the joint oppression of the Nazis and the fascists of the Social Republic was more fierce and desperate than elsewhere.
On the eve of an inevitable debacle, fascists and Nazis clung to the last resources and indulged in unnecessarily brutal, barbaric, fatal actions that did not respond to any war but only to the congenital bestiality of their conscience. Left alone in the face of Nazi-fascist barbarism and at the beginning of the harsh winter of 1944, many men and many women chose the clandestine struggle.
Although Fascist education had raised them with martial images and precepts, most of them had no idea what the violence of war could be. But that violence constituted a key moment in their existence, a formative and foundational rupture experience. Shootings, despoiling, hangings, torture, massacres, physical and moral miseries did not weaken their courage. Collected in an irregular 'army', although often structured in divisions and commands, the freedom volunteers represented a fighting reality in which the relationship with the territory was fundamental, because only with the support of the civilian population, the resisters could move and hide in a busy city.
The Forgotten Front - The Resistance in Bologna'marks' the places where women and men active in the partisan movement threw grenades, carried out acts of unarmed opposition or executions on the street, demonstrated, protested, offered assistance, risked and often paid with life their will to change the world of tomorrow. A tomorrow that would come with the resumption of the Allied offensive on April 9, 1945 and the liberation of Bologna on April 21.
Seventy-five years after the documentary by Soglia and Stanzanithe faces of the partisans re-emerge under the grain of old films, unpublished archival materials where their sacrifice has never been more tangible, more tragic. Hunters of lost images, who marry the vocation of three Bolognese institutions in the service of the cause, Cineteca (spectacular device), laboratory (storage device) and university (theoretical device), the directors not only give readability to photographs and frames but recover internal polarity.
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