Premiere for International Women’s Day | March 8, 2023
On August 12, 1944, the Nazis entered the Italian town of Sant’anna di Stazzema, located in the Apuan Alps, and murdered 560 residents and refugees, mostly women, girls, and boys.
In this short film specially produced to commemorate International Women’s Day 2023, the filmmaker Carolina Astudillo presents the unpublished testimonies of the sisters Adele and Syria Pardini, who experienced themselves this tragedy when kids. The piece, shot in super 8, proposes a reflection on the memory of tragic events, the female resistance to horror and on how these stories can be explained. To do so, she relies on the text by Susan Sontag that gives the film its title, on “The Dimensions of the Holocaust” by Elie Weisel, and on “Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz” by Georges Didi-Huberman.
Duration: 10’32”. Original version: Spanish and Italian. Subtitled in English, Catalan and Spanish. Co-produced by the EUROM with the support of the programme Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values on the occasion of International Women’s Day 2023.
Background information
Adele Pardini was four years old when she was saved from a firing squad. Her nine-year-old sister, Syria, managed to survive since she was in the field that day with her father.
Similar massacres were repeated in other towns in Tuscany and the rest of Italy.
The testimonies and investigations of the crimes committed by the Nazis and fascists were handed over to Justice, but they were archived for years, for reasons of political coexistence. Italy did not want to cloud its relations with Germany.
In 1994 a military prosecutor found these files in an abandoned cabinet facing the wall in the Cesi-Gaddi Palace in Rome, which will be known as the cabinet of shame.
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