Francesco Rosi
Italy
Adapted from Primo Levi's account of Holocaust survivors travelling home, Francesco Rosi's La tregua (The Truce) comes to Cannes having won four David di Donatellos Italian cinema awards - Best Film, Best Director, Best Producer and Best Editor. Distributed by Warner Bros, the pan-European co-production has so far recorded $2.7 million in Italy.
John Turturro (Box of Moonlight, Sugartime) plays Levi, wracked by scarlet fever and almost mute when the Red Army liberates Auschwitz. He travels across Europe with a rag tag collection of survivors - including 'The Greek' (Rade Serbedzija, Broken English, Before the Rain) and his best friend Cesare (Massimo Ghini, Il carniere, Celluloide) - at once haunted by memories of the Holocaust and rediscovering a desire to live.
"The horror and the suffering of the concentration camps has been well-documented," acknowledges Rosi, veteran director of 1972 Palme d'Or winner Il caso mattei and 1963's Leone d'Oro winner Le mani sulla citta. "What interested me more was trying to bring to the screen what Levi succeeded in doing so extra-ordinarily well in his book: recounting, through the tales of his remarkable adventures, the process of re-awakening, of coming back to life, and of the re-acquisition of hope through the experience of daily events, small and large."
Despite the casting of American star Turturro, producer Leo Pescarolo says financing the film was problematic as its subject "was considered a bit too difficult". Eventually, a pan-European co-production came together, with back-ing from French producer Vera Bel-mont; Germany's the Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen; Swiss producer Marcel Hoehn; Italy's RAI Television; the Eurimages Subsidy Fund; and UK sales house Capitol Films, which put up $3.5 million. Broadcaster Channel Four acquired UK TV rights.
Rosi shot many sequences where the actual events in Levi's memoirs took place, particularly in the Ukraine. "One of the most startling things about shooting in the Ukraine was how easy it was to find landscapes with that same sense of desolation described by Levi in 1945," says Pescarolo. "Certain parts of the Ukraine, a country still devastated by the effects of World War II, appear to be frozen in time. It would have been impossible to capture that look and that feeling anywhere else in the world."
"The Truce is the kind of film that you could never make in Hollywood," adds Turturro, who won a Palme d'Or for Best Actor for Barton Fink in 1991. "One of the strongest, most realistic things about it is the use of the real faces of the Ukraine, faces that are intelligent, long-suffering and very much aware of the poverty they've endured since World War II."
Rosi believes recent events have imbued The Truce with fresh significance. "The Berlin wall fell in 1989 and the hope of a renewed fraternity made me feel the project was even more relevant and somehow even more necessary," he recalls. "The events which have since shaken Eastern Europe and ex-Yugoslavia have justified that sense of necessity, and justified Primo Levi's admonitions. As Levi wrote in his introduction to The Truce: 'Now we have finished telling the story. The time has come. Soon we will hear the foreign commands once more...'"Primo Levi committed suicide in 1987. Born in 1919 in Turin, he became a partisan during World War II, was captured in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz in 1944. He wrote If This is a Man just after his liberation, describing his experiences in the camp. The Truce was published in 1963 and won the Premio Campiello literary prize.
"He who has been tortured, remains tortured," Levi wrote a year before his death. "He who has undergone the torment will never again be at home in the world. The abomination of annulment will never again be extinguished."
Adam Minns
Prod co: 3 Emme Cinematografica
Prod: Leo Pescarolo, Guido de Laurentiis
Dir: Francesco Rosi
Scr: Francesco Rosi, Stefano Rulli, Sandro Petraglia
Ph: Pasqualino de Santis, Marco Pontecorvo
Art dir: Andrea Crisanti
Cos: Alberto Verso
Ed: Ruggero Mastroianni, Bruno Sarandrea
Cast: John Turturro, Massimo Ghini, Rade Serbedzija
Running time: 125mins
Int sales: Capitol Films
