Bella Ciao! Program 1 – Slow return to life

Victory on the right bank of Ukraine and driving the German aggressors out of the borders of Soviet Ukraine
Aleksandr Dovzhenko and Yuliya Solntseva. Soviet Union, 1945. 65′

Red Army liberates Ukraine from Nazi occupiers: the great filmmaker Dovzhenko is on the front
line documenting History.

The film chronicles the exploits of the Red Army and Ukrainian citizens in defeating the Nazi occupiers and rebuilding the territory. Kiev is liberated, as is the rest of Ukraine. Dovzhenko was the first to make extensive use of documentary sequences shot by the enemy and exploited as spoils of war, giving them a new sound accompaniment and imparting another meaning, through innovative editing techniques.

Proud of his Ukrainian origins, Aleksandr Dovženko (1894-1956) was one of the greatest and most innovative directors of Soviet cinema. With his wife Yuliya Solntseva, who would take up his spiritual legacy, he also made a number of war documentaries of impressive visual power.

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Warsaw Suite
Tadeusz Makarczyński. Poland, 1946. 19′

Warsaw is a heap of ruins, but from its ashes a new world, the one dreamed of by the partisans who liberated it, is perhaps beginning to be reborn.

Poetic portrait of a mutilated and war-torn Warsaw, a fallen city slowly reawakening. The refined beauty of the cinematography, the evocative vision of the Polish capital, and the depiction of the return to life after the drama of war did not please the pro-Soviet authorities: for them, the tale of the spontaneous uprising of the Polish people held little regard for the role of the Communist Party.

A screenwriter and documentary filmmaker, Tadeusz Makarczyński (1918- 1987) directed the film section of the International Health Organization in Geneva and collaborated on films commissioned by the UN. He was a lecturer at the National Film School in Łódź.

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Toward Life
Dino Risi. Italy, 1947. 12′

A war orphan rediscovers lost innocence,even in a broken city,despite everything.

In war-torn Milan, Emilio is taken into an orphanage. Gradually, the company of other children helps him regain
his lost innocence.

From the 1950s to the 2000s, Dino Risi (1916-2008) traversed the different eras of Italian cinema, from neorealism to the golden period of Italian-style comedy. Today we rediscover his beginnings as a documentary filmmaker of poor and moving postwar Italy