The documentary “Italianesi”, directed by Saverio La Ruina, won at the 22nd edition of the Tirana Film Festival, in the Panorama Reflecting Albania category.
The film was presented as a world premiere last September 24th at the Agimi Art Center in Tirana, in the presence of the director, the director of the Italian Cultural Institute of Tirana, Alessandro Ruggera, and the Calabria Film Commission.
Italianesi, produced by Scena Verticale and made with the support of the Calabria Film Commission, is a documentary that tells, through the testimonies of the protagonists, a little-known piece of Italian history. Inspired by the individual story brought to the theater by the director himself in 2011 (2012 Ubu Award for best actor and nomination for best new Italian text).
“I am really happy with this Award – declared the director Saverio La Ruina – even more so with making known a piece of unknown reality which concerns the fate of thousands of Italians until 1955. I agree with what an Albanian filmmaker friend told me: looking at what happened to these Italians during those decades in Albania is a way for Albanians to look at themselves from the outside and reflect in a new way on the fate of the entire Albanian population during the dictatorship”.
Synopsis
An unknown page of Italian and European history. At the end of the Second World War, approximately 25,000 Italians, including civilians and soldiers, remained stranded in Albania. Most will be repatriated but hundreds will remain stranded there until the fall of the communist regime in 1991. Pierino Cieno, one of the many children of Italian and Albanian parents, was interned with his mother first in the Savër camp and then in Belsh. Only when the regime falls, after forty years of living in the dream of his father and of Italy, does he experience freedom and go to Italy in search of his father. Like him, around four hundred Italian citizens and their descendants were repatriated in 1991 by the Italian Government through the CORA operation, convinced that they would be welcomed as heroes but paradoxically condemned to be Italians in Albania and Albanians in Italy: Italianese, in fact.
