The documentary Po, coming to cinemas, produced by the Istituto Luce about the tragedy that forced 100,000 Polesani to leave their homes. Memories of the survivors
It is not just wars that disrupt peoples’ lives. Sometimes it is Nature that destroys but the results are similar because they transform the inhabitants into refugees, forced to look for other spaces to live. This is the message that the beautiful documentary leaves us Po, arriving in cinemas, made by Andrea Segre and Gian Antonio Stella and produced by the Istituto Luce on the flood that in November 1951 forced 100,000 Polesani to leave their homes, submerged by water. At that time they did not have TV but five operators documented the facts for what was then the means of mass communication, cinema, and its newsreels restored the immense dimension of that tragedy to the whole country. He resumed that Segre and Stella have recovered (and restored) to accompany the memories of those who were then a child and suffered the fate of the refugee on their own skin. Today they are all over seventy years old, some even eighty but the memory of those days has never been erased because, if the logic of the rescue was to first save the children, many were taken and separated from their parents, who were left to wait for the children. subsequent rescuers. Often ending up having to wait even a month before being reunited with mothers and fathers. Unless it had happened like those 84 people who got on a truck to escape were overwhelmed by a sudden wave of flood, drowning. And the memories of a son (alive because he was separated from his parents and taken away earlier) are among the most heartbreaking moments in the film: “Nobody told me anything, they were even ashamed to talk to me so as not to have to tell me what had happened”. Segre and Stella don’t ask questions, they let memory do its job, helping the viewer with excerpts from newsreels whose comments clash with the pain of silent faces. There are those who also remember with cheerful impertinence the tug-of-war over a plate of soup with the anti-Communist parish priest who had heard her sing
Red flag
with friends. But there are also those who have not forgotten the hunger of his condition as an “emigrant” in Piedmont or the not so disguised contempt of those who called them by the name of their country and not with that of baptism. All united by a fate of “refugees” that has never been canceled.
March 25, 2022 (change March 25, 2022 | 21:04)
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