ANITA B., A YOUNG WOMAN'S COURAGE IN A NEW MOVIE BY ROBERTO FAENZA - MY REVIEW

Today is the international Holocaust Remembrance Day and I've been glad and proud of our special school day: at the cinema with 150 students and some colleagues. A day we've prepared in our lessons in the last few days, a day not to forget and to build new hopes.

I've already posted about this movie by Roberto Faenza, Anita B.,   released only in our country, Italy, so far,  in limited theatres and in just a few cities. That's really a shame! I hope it'll get the attention it deserves, maybe when it gets to the US next summer. Lots of students are seeing it these days thanks to Anita B. Progetto Scuole: that's at least a very positive aspect for the promotion of the movie. 

I  also  read and reviewed the novel by Edith Bruck, on which the film is freely based, "Quanta stella c'è nel cielo." Someone who knows him well told me Roberto Faenza usually says: "Two fathers, two children". That means, books and the movies based on them must be considered for what they are: different art works by different artists. Faenza wrote the script in collaboration with the author of the novel, anyway. So we can imagine she agrees with the changes, the cuts and the additions. I personally liked all the director's choices, especially his rewriting Eli, the male protagonist. Impossible to like him, but in the film at least we are given reasons for his behaviour.

BOOK REVIEW - QUANTA STELLA C'E' NEL CIELO BY EDITH BRUCK (2009) - SOON AN INTERNATIONAL MOVIE, ANITA B., BY ROBERTO FAENZA

I came to read this book after hearing that Italian director Roberto Faenza was making a movie out of it  (Anita B.) and I’m so  glad I discovered both novel and author. It’s been a great read which I happened to find  just when I was working on 20th century literature with my oldest students.  I couldn’t actually use it in my lessons,  since it hasn’t been translated into English and I teach English not Italian  literature,  but I think it gave indirectly a great contribution to my introduction of the general  background context and to  suggest my students connections and links coming directly from witnesses who lived and survived the tragic reality of WWII.

There's no grammar mistake in the title, it was just meant to sound "How much star is there in the sky",  like in   Sàndor Petöfi's ballad.  

Edith Bruck,  like Anita the young protagonist of  “Quanta stella c’è nel cielo”,     survived being imprisoned in a concentration camp and this is what makes the narration even more touching though it is never too sentimental nor melodramatic.  

 Edith Bruck won the Premio Viareggio Narrativa 2009 for this novel. She’s been living in Italy  since soon after WWII and has become a writer in the Italian language since the Hungarian tongue brought painful memories back to  her mind, the memories of being a rejected, persecuted Jewish child imprisoned in several Nazi concentration camps (Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen). 

She tells she  couldn’t even say “ciao” in our language when she arrived in Rome as a  desperate orphan, but wanted to learn Italian and use it in order to be born again,  into a new life, in order to forget those memories which were  poisoning her. 

She felt welcome here in our country. Italy and her were extremely poor at that time and she felt immediately at home in Rome. The experience  of Anita B., the protagonist of the book, is quite different, though.