The trailer for The Man Who Will Come (L'uomo che verrà) which will play at the 2010 San Francisco Film Festival.
In the fall of 1944, on the slopes of Monte Sole south of Bologna, fascism showed its face in one of the worst massacres on Italian soil. As a reprisal against local villagers for support of partisan activity, German SS troops systematically murdered nearly 800 people, most of them women, children and elderly. Giorgio Diritti illuminates the incident—now buried deep in Italy’s cultural memory, if not in the memories of its survivors—in a very specific way: He creates an almost elegiac portrait of peasant life as seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old child. Martina has fallen mute since the death of her infant brother; now her mother is pregnant again, and Martina awaits the infant as her own rebirth. Her father and other villagers, meanwhile, debate the wisdom of aiding the partisans, until encroaching violence makes it no longer a question. For some, to be a partisan is to recognize the degree to which fascism and then the war made poor peasants even poorer. For others, the issue is not one of rebellion but of morality: “The Germans do what we were taught not to do.” But the heinous crime perpetrated against these people will raze beliefs along with souls. Even so, Diritti manages to make a work as rich in beauty and hope as in wonder at the depths of inhumanity.