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Refugees in Cinecittà: An Evening with Marco Bertozzi

Refugees in Cinecittà/ Profughi a Cinecittà: An Evening with Marco Bertozzi

Introduction by director, professor and author Marco Bertozzi and researcher and scholar Noa Steimatsky (UC).

Cinecittà, the great movie studio built by Mussolini, became universally known as “Hollywood on the Tiber” and as Fellini’s second home. But in an interim period (1944-50) it served very different functions, quite unlike that of a dream factory. Under the Nazi occupation of Rome it was a transit camp for deportees, then following the liberation, it was transformed by the Allies into one of the largest displaced persons camps in Italy. People of some 30 nationalities, entire families, children who had lost everything but their lives, found refuge there. Their experience living among the remnants of collossal movie sets is at the heart of this film directed by documentarist and film scholar Marco Bertozzi, and based on groundbreaking research by Noa Steimatsky (UC). This vivid, startling documentary explores the fortunes of the Cinecitta camp and its inhabitants, unfolding a story hitherto untold in the chronicles of European reconstruction, and of film history.

(Marco Bertozzi, 2012, Italy, DVD, 52 min)

Professor of history of documentary cinema at the University of Venice, and a founding member of DOC/IT, the Italian documentary filmmakers’ association, Marco Bertozzi (1963) has published numerous studies of documentary cinema and relationships among the cinema, architecture and the city, and has produced numerous award-winning films. His latest monograph is History of the Italian Documentary (Venice, 2008), which is used as a text book in several Italian universities and which received the Domenico Meccoli and Limina Awards 2009 for best cinema book of the year.

Co-sponsored by Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Human Rights Program, and Chicago Center for Jewish Studies.

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