REMEMBRANCE – “Le Case di Micol”, four documentaries about life before and after 1938
“One day I stayed away rather too long, wandering around on the city walls with a gang of boys I’d made friends with, who gave me rides on the bars of their bikes, and when I got home I found Mama and Papa in such despair that ever since (because Micòl’s a good sort really, she’s got a heart of gold!), ever since then I decided to be good, and never escaped again.” These few lines, drawn from Giorgio Bassani’s masterpiece The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, show all the light heartedness of the novel’s protagonist Micòl. It is the life of a young woman from the Jewish bourgeoisie of Ferrara, made of friendships, bike rides, tennis matches, a big house, a loving yet overprotective family. The life before the abomination of the racial laws, of the persecutions, of the Shoah. It is the life, explained Stefano Muroni to Pagine Ebraiche, that inspired “Le Case di Micol” (The Houses of Micòl), a project that has just been awarded a European call dedicated to remembrance.
“The idea is to tell, in each short twelve-minute documentary, the life of a Jewish woman before the upcoming horrors. To reconstruct, through a direct testimony or a descendent, the moments of happiness and love lived by these people, taking their houses as the starting point,” explained Muroni, president of the association Ferrara La Città del Cinema. The project that he launched together with his association involves, among others, the national Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah, the Giorgio Bassani Foundation and three European partners: Prague Film School, the Warsaw Film School and the Belgian CINACT. “Each of these four countries will choose a woman and a house to tell about. Our association is committed to enhancing the territory and, together with our partners, we will find our story here in Ferrara,” pointed out Muroni. Also because Ferrara is Bassani and Micòl’s hometown. “In her story we can find a universal root. Hence the project’s title ‘The Houses of Micòl’.”
The four documentaries, explained Muroni, will be premiered in Ferrara in a two-day event of insights on racial laws and the period of the persecutions. The event’s title will be “Le Case di Micol-Festival della Memoria.” “The project also includes the implementation of an interactive map representing these houses. We will start with those in Ferrara, in the Czech Republic, in Poland and in Belgium, but we hope that this initiative will serve as an example in Europe for other houses to tell about more women and their life stories”.
Translated by Marta Gustinucci and revised by Francesca Pischedda, students at the Secondary School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, trainees at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities – Pagine Ebraiche.