April 25 in memory. Partisan women and women who don't forget them - Lifestyle

On April 25, Italy celebrates the Liberation from Nazifascism. A day full of memory in which the heroes of the Resistance are celebrated every year: the partisans, their courage, their actions. Men are celebrated on April 25th. Of those "bicyclists who went like the wind", as in 1944 went Dina Croce, historic Lombard partisan relay, just two lines, a hint, almost a nuisance in official communications. But it is also those "bicyclists" who made Italy. Pedaling, carrying weapons, messages, blowing bridges, roads, tracks. Fighting like men, dying like men.

The documentary "Partisans 2.0. Freedom is always twenty years old" aired on Saturday 25 April at 9.15 pm on Sky Arte and in live streaming on the same day at 3.00 pm and 9.00 pm (a production called Associazione Chiamale Storie) and Sky Arte) as part of the memoMI project, created by 3D Produzioni Thirty-five thousand Italian women. Girls who at twenty risked everything, often life, in order to see a new free and democratic Italy. Women who were then forgotten, crushed behind the scenes of history by an all-male narrative of the Resistance, sent home after the Liberation to the role of mothers, wives, daughters. Despite everything, those girls of yesterday are still here. At ninety, I'm still here: with those twenty years forever in my eyes.

To extend the baton of Memory to today's girls: the "partisans 2.0", the "bicyclists" who in the Milan of 2020 get on the saddle and go to restore the partisan plates, the marbles humiliated by the neglect of time and by the violence of who would like to erase history. The documentary makes use of many valuable historical testimonies and documents, including the images of "L a donna nella Resistenza " the documentary shot in 1965, twenty years after the Liberation, by Liliana Cavani who was the first to lift the veil of reticence and of hypocrisy on women partisans, reduced in the collective imagination to red crosses, simple assistants, rather than real fighters. Today it is the same Cavani, interviewed here, to retrace the mood of those years, in a continuous reference with current events. A passage between yesterday and today that comes alive through the words of three protagonists of the time: Laura Wronowski, Ebe Bavestrelli, Dina Croce, three historical names of the Italian Resistance who retrace their partisan experience, opening the most intimate drawers of memory personal and offering spaces for general reflection on the role of women.

Theme on which the young "partisans 2.0", Ilaria Laise and Cecilia Gnocchi, compare themselves in gestures and words, filmed on the field in the streets and squares of Milan while they restore the tombstones of the partisans, between stairs, solvents and dyes. A choral story that extends from black and white Italy of the fascist twenty years and reaches the colorful murals of the suburbs of today, where the rebellion of writers keeps the spirit of those battles that are transgenerational ignited: alongside the faces of the partisans of the time the faces of today's human rights activists. A story with many stories, from those of Tina Anselmi, partisan relay, and of Oriana Fallaci, a 14-year-old bicyclist in Florence in '43, to that of Genni Wiegmann Mucchi, Berlin artist and activist in resistant Milan, whose sculptures of partisan women speak still that same language. All inserted in a historical context that the young researcher Iara Meloni will help to focus on. To close the documentary the words of Dina Croce, with her courage and her strength: "Yes I would do it a hundred times, and I would do it again. I would do it again because it was the most exciting period of my life ... But you do it with such a passion that nothing can change you, and it's a fantastic thing ".