Working in the area we found "still very open wounds, I didn't expect it. There is still a need on the part of many to have answers, there are still very strong divisions".
Director Tiziana Aristarco explains it, speaking about the TV film she directed The Rose of Istria, with, among others, Andrea Pennacchi, debutant Gracjela Kicaj, Clotilde Sabatino, Costantino Seghi and Eugenio Franceschini which will debut on Rai 1 first evening on February 5th, shortly before Remembrance Day, in memory of the victims of the foibe and the Julian-Dalmatian exodus.
The story, loosely based on the novel "Who's Afraid of the Black Man?"
by Graziella Fiorentin (Corbaccio) addresses the theme through the family drama of the Istrians Braico, who faced with the growing dangers following the armistice of '43 in Italy, between the German soldiers trying to reorganize themselves in the Republic of Salò and the Marshal's troops Tito intending to annex Istria to Yugoslavia, decide to leave their homeland to find refuge in Friuli.
"It is another stage in the range of stories that we want to tell about our country in the name of a shared memory, also because we see how certain tragedies are repeated even today - explains in the press conference the director of Rai Fiction Maria Pia Ammirati, who rejects the "the idea that the TV film is a reflection of the so-called 'Telemeloni' - I exclude the idea that there was a thought behind the construction of a new narrative. Also because we started writing three years ago".
It is "important to also tell parts of history that have still been told enough. Let's talk about everyone, let's stop talking about just one part, the richness of this country is the stories, we need to make them known".
La Rosa dell'Istria, co-produced by Rai Fiction, Publispei and Venicefilm (which had already made Red land by Maximiliano Hernando Bruno, here co-writer with Angelo Petrella and co-producer, on the theme of the foibe), inserts the great story in a key "that makes it deliberately accessible to the widest possible audience, that of the popular novel" adds Ammirati.
Thus we follow the exodus of the Braico family, marked right at the beginning by the fate of the eldest son, Nicolò.
The head of the family, Antonio, a doctor (Pennacchi), takes his wife and two children, 18-year-old Maddalena, a talented painter and his youngest son Saulo, first to Friuli, then to Veneto, amidst disorientation, prejudices, economic difficulties and new beginnings.
A path in which Maddalena (Kicaj) meets Leo (Franceschini), also a young painter, who encourages her to believe in her talent: a path that puts her on a collision course with her father.
"The exodus involved 350 thousand people who over the course of six, seven,
for eight years they had to leave their home and their possessions to remain Italian" recalls Alessandro Centenaro, co-producer for Venice Film. It is "an important film on which we worked with great love and passion - adds Verdiana Bixio, co-producer for Publispei -.
There is a notable production effort and you can see an incredible amount of Friulian territory, with around eighty locations". In the role of the protagonist there is the debutant Graciela Kicai, an Albanian who has lived in Italy since she was a child, now a student at 'Brera Academy: "I came to Italy when I was very young and I didn't experience bullying or being marginalized like Maddalena does" she explains.
However, the film "is a theme that we find every day in the news, from Ukraine to the Middle East, we all see how history repeats itself".
Andrea Pennacchi agrees with her: "The memory you have and which guides your actions in the present is different from the history they teach you at school - underlines the actor - I say this as the son and grandson of partisans. Now we see in the world the failure of memories that failed to dialogue with each other. These are stories that need to be told because they also concern the world we live in now."
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