MONDAY 17 NOV – H 21:00 – ROOM 1

AUSCHWITZ 2006
ITALY – 2007 – color – 50’

Direction: Saverio Costanzo
Screenplay: Saverio Costanzo
Cinematography: Giovanni Troilo
Editing: Francesca Calvelli
Producer: Mario Gianani
Production: Offside, Istituto Luce
Distribution: Cinecittà Luce

Synopsis
In 2006, the Mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, along with the Jewish Community, organized a visit to the Auschwitz extermination camp for 250 high school students from Rome.
It was a journey of remembrance with the intention that young people should never forget. The students arrived at the largest extermination camp, where the Nazis attempted to carry out their systematic elimination of the Jewish people.
They were accompanied by filmmaker Saverio Costanzo’s camera and a few Italian survivors of the death camps, ready to recount the persecution, torture, and annihilation they had suffered.
The images alternate with archive footage from the Istituto Luce, making it increasingly clear that the Holocaust does not belong only to our past.

Critical note
“(…) The work of this young filmmaker continues to astonish with seriousness and rigor (…) Saverio Costanzo also deserves credit for how he relates to the protagonists of this dialectical confrontation, eliminating for them the heavy presence of the camera during their meetings—except for those alienating moments consisting of the fixed shots of individual participants on the expedition, as they posed in front of the dreary backdrop of the barracks and barbed wire of Auschwitz. It is almost a way of affirming that awareness of what once happened there has now become a participatory heritage, to be shared between those who experienced it firsthand and those who are determined to preserve its memory.”
(Stefano Coccia, spietati.it, March 29, 2007)

Festival
2007 Festa del Cinema, Roma – Extra