Profound passion and anguished terror collide in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Vittorio de Sica’s 1970 Oscar-winner. As the film screens at the
UK Jewish film festival, we reassess its astonishing power
‘In life, in order to really understand the world, you must die at least once. So it’s better to die young, while there’s time to recover and live again.” The speaker is a middle-aged Italian Jewish businessman of Ferrara, in the early 1940s, attempting to console his heartbroken son, Giorgio – who has been rejected by a young woman, Micòl Finzi-Contini. But these words are to have a terrible ironic significance, because it is Micòl, not Giorgio, who is destined to be taken away by the fascists, along with the rest of her Jewish family, and handed over to Italy’s ally, Nazi
Germany, for deportation to the death camps.
Together, poor besotted Giorgio and the exquisitely unattainable Micòl are the non-lovers in Vittorio de Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, his profoundly disturbing and mysterious 1970 film about doomed love and fascist horror. To mark the 50th anniversary of this film, which won the best foreign film Oscar and the Golden Bear at the
Berlin film festival, it is to get a special screening at the UK Jewish film festival, accompanied by a Zoom discussion in which the film’s French star, Dominique Sanda, will take part.