What is “Day of Remembrance“? January 27, 1945 marked the demolition of the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Thus, as stated in Article 1 of the Law of July 20th 2000, n. 211, “The Italian Republic recognizes the 27th day of January, date of the gates of Auschwitz,” Day of Remembrance “in order to remember the Holocaust (extermination of the Jewish people), the racial laws, the persecution of Italian Jewish citizens , Italians who suffered deportation, imprisonment, death, and those who, even in different fields and camps, have opposed the project of extermination, and risked their lives to save more lives as well as protected the persecuted. “
On the occasion of the “Day of Remembrance 2017“, the Italian Cultural Institute, in collaboration with McGill University, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures – Italian Studies, is pleased to present the film by Vittorio De Sica, The Garden of Finzi-Continis (1970, ITA, 94′, O.V. with English subtitles; screenplay by Vittorio Bonicelli and Ugo Pirro; based on the novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962) by Giorgio Bassani, starring Lino Capolicchio, Dominique Sanda, Helmut Berger).
Il Giardino dei Finzi Contini is the story of the aristocratic Jewish Finzi-Contini family in Ferrara (Northern Italy), between 1938 and 1943. Expelled from all local institutions (as was for all the Italian Jews starting from 1938), the family opens the gate of its big garden to visitors. There, their daughter Micol uses to play tennis with her friends, among them Giorgio (the son of a lower middle-class Jewish family) and the non-Jewish radical Malnate. The film, released in 1970, was the screen adaptation of Giorgio Bassani’s novel published in 1962, and was directed by the Italian acclaimed director Vittorio De Sica. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. It also won the Golden Bear at the 21st Berlin International Film Festival in 1971.
The screening will be introduced by Damiano Garofalo (Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”), who will focus both on the production and the critical reception of the film. While the film was well received by the public and the film critic, there were several controversies over some alterations of the book, which led to Giorgio Bassani attempting to distance himself from Vittorio De Sica’s work.
Thursday 26th January 2017, 5:30 pm
Università McGill, Wendy Patrick Room, Wilson Hall, 3506 University Street
Damiano Garofalo is a scholar of Italian television. He received his Ph.D. in “Cultural History” at the University of Padova. He is currently Adjunct Professor in “Television Studies” at the University of Padova (DAMS) and in “Italian Cinema History” at Sapienza University in Rome, where he is also Teaching Assistant in “Film & Media Studies”. He has co-edited with Vanessa Roghi the book “Televisione: Storia, Immaginario, Memoria” [Television: History, Imagination, and Memory] (Cosenza, 2015), a groundbreaking work about Italian television audiences. His most recent publication is the book on “Political Audiences: A Reception History of Early Italian Television” (Milano, 2016). His work is particularly noteworthy and exciting insofar as it relies on rare and difficult to access archival material. Trained in the Italian academy, Garofalo possesses the robust understanding of Italian cultural, social and political history necessary to grasp the full significance of such material.