Italy offers up a double whammy of intriguing and striking films says Judi Herman

I was intrigued to discover two Italian films screening at this year’s UK Jewish Film Festival, one set in Rome, the other in north-eastern Italy near Trieste, and both covering not just the legacy of the Holocaust for the descendants of those caught up in World War II, but also relations between Jews and non-Jews.

The darker of the two, writer/director Mauro Mancini’s first feature-length film Thou Shalt Not Hate, is the ‘heavy weight’ opening the festival at a gala screening. It is both disturbing and beautiful. Its Italian countryside setting is captured with extraordinary sensitivity from the perspective of the canoe in which top surgeon Simone Segre likes to relax, paddling down a scenic river banked by gloriously lush landscapes. This scene is bookended by two traumas, however. The film opens by a lake, its peace disturbed by the piteous mew of kittens. Simone as a boy is forced by his father, a concentration camp survivor, to choose one kitten to save from a sackful, before plunging the rest to their deaths.

Fast forward to the successful medic in his prime on the water, when the splash of oars is drowned out by the scream of metal from a lethal car crash. It seems the critically injured driver has a chance of survival as the highly-trained first responder races to the scene. But as he applies a makeshift tourniquet and rips the victim’s shirt open to apply first aid, he’s stopped in his tracks by the huge swastika tattooed on his chest and this survivor’s son is out of there, leaving the man to his fate.

Thou Shalt Not Hate trailer

The victim proves to be a local neo-Nazi leader and the scenes that follow at his funeral, where his black leather-clad, shaven-headed followers give the Nazi salute, are among the most disturbing in the film. Yet when Simone reads of the neo-Nazi's death, he is filled with remorse.

The core scenes at the narrative’s heart concern his efforts to track down the dead man’s cash-strapped family – two sons and a daughter – and, rather like a latter-day Scrooge, make amends to these young people without them knowing his identity. The commandment, 'Thou Shalt Not Hate’, is directed as much to the reclusive Simone, as to the nasty piece of work that is the older son, a fascist following in his father’s goosesteps, who enjoys nothing more than threatening and abusing Jews.

There are detailed and bravely convincing performances from the small core cast. Alessandro Gassman’s Simone is a troubled recluse, embittered by his legacy, so that his role in this tragedy is as problematic as it seems ordained. Sara Serraiocco is touching and sympathetic as bereaved daughter Marica, whose apparent fragility belies her steely determination to work almost 24 hours a day, as a cleaner and assistant at an all-hours convenience store, to keep the family of siblings together. Luka Zunic pulls no punches with his account of aggressive neo-Nazi thug Marcello, yet even he elicits some sympathy and understanding especially for his care of younger brother Paolo (Lorenzo Buonora).

What links director Giulio Base’s A Starry Sky Above the Roman Ghetto to Thou Shalt Not Hate is its concentration on the younger generation of Italians, both Jewish and non-Jewish. It also begins in the all too familiar violent past of the wartime years at the height of the 1943 Nazi occupation of Rome.

Terrified Jews seeking refuge in a convent are forcibly dragged away to the barking of vicious dogs – and the despair of the nuns. These scenes are effectively shot in black and white, though there is no real need to differentiate between the violent past and the apparently bright and full-colour 21st-century city.

Here we meet talented secondary school student Sofia (vivacious and intelligent in Alessandra Carrillo’s vivid performance), who has inherited her father’s musical talent; the story is all about her wish to study music, despite her mother’s insistence that she should study something more conventionally sensible as well. It is good to meet the family in detail and, just when you're wondering if there can be any connection at all between this plot line and those stark opening scenes, Sofia finds a suitcase in the attic containing a black and white photo of a young girl and a letter apparently from her mother, addressing the girl as Sarah Cohen. I have to admit that I found it all too easy to guess where this was leading, but all the joy and complexity of the storytelling here is in the journey.

A Starry Sky Above the Roman Ghetto trailer

Sofia manages to engage the interest of her equally talented school friends and together they go in search of Sarah and her story. It’s hardly a spoiler to reveal that their search does indeed lead them to the convent and to one nun in particular. What is unexpected, is that Sofia will write a musical account of Sarah and their search for her, and that in her efforts to make it authentic, she will engage for the first time with Rome’s naturally watchful Jewish community. Once she has understood why they guard the comings and goings at their synagogue, this engagement goes so well that the young Jews join the search for Sarah with their Christian counterparts – and it’s no surprise that Sofia finds romance too.

You may well have already guessed how the story ends – but please don’t let it put you off taking a journey on which you will have no trouble staying the distance.

By Judi Herman

Thou Shalt Not Hate is available online Thursday 11–Sunday 14 November. ukjewishfilm.eventive.org/films/613b26aa91902600c816bbba

A Starry Sky Above the Roman Ghetto is available online Saturday 13–Tuesday 16 November and in person Sunday 14 November at HOME Manchester (3.30pm) and JW3 London (5.30pm). ukjewishfilm.eventive.org/films/613b273800a27f004cefe2b6