Title: My Italian Secret – Forgotten Heroes
Director: Oren Jacoby
Starring: Andrea Bartali, Pietro Borromeo, Gaia Servadio, Charlotte Hauptman, Pietro Terracina, Ursula Korn Selig.
‘My Italian Secret’ tells the story of sports idol Gino Bartali and other Italians who saved Jews and refugees fleeing the Nazis in WWII.
Bartali, the Tour de France cycling champion, made hundreds of trips transporting fake documents in the frame of his bicycle for a secret underground organised by the Cardinal and the Rabbi of Florence. In the meantime doctor Giovanni Borromeo, who worked at the Fatebenefratelli Hospital in Rome, created a ward to treat the terribly contagious non-existent ‘K’ disease, that mocked Kappler and Kesselring and bought time with the German troops to hide Jews and create the fake documents to allow them to flee to safer pastures.
These stories are accounted by many people who experienced firsthand the help of the “Army of Schindlers from Italy”, which is the title of an article published on the Wall Street Journal in 1993 that revealed that 80% of the Jews in Italy were spared from the Shoah. Thusly, the living characters in the film return to Italy to reveal the story and thank those who were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to save a stranger’s life.
The documentary, narrated by Isabella Rossellini, is an ode to those who carried out good deeds for the sake of brotherhood. Those who had no ulterior motive to save a life, in a time where such an act would cost your own life.
This tender account – directed with elegance and ground-work by Oren Jacoby – will bring tears to your eyes for joy, a sensation that was missing for quite some time when walking in a movie theatre. Usually tears sprout for the empathy with the character’s distraught and dramatic consequences. In this case you cry because you’re happy, because this gem of a movie, without using any fiction, but accounting real life, instills hope in the goodness of humans. Solidarity is the great lesson taught by ‘My Italian Secret.’
The film was appropriately presented at the Rome Film Festival on the 16th of October to recall the “Black Saturday” of 1943, when at 5:15 am, the SS invaded the streets of the ghetto in Rome and took away 1024 Jews, including over 200 children.
Technical: B
Story: A-
Overall: B+
Written by: Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi
