Berlin to show docufilm on a long-forgotten WW2 crime

(AGI) Berlin, August 18 - A painful past comes alive in "Im Markischen Sand - Nella sabbia di Brandeburgo," a film by directors Katalin Ambrus, Nina Mair and Matthias Neumann that will be screened at the Italian Cultural Institute in Berlin on September 8. The journey the three directors undertook started with a crime that was kept hidden for decades: German Wehrmacht soldiers killed 127 Italian military internees in a sand quarry at Treuenbrietzen, a town in Brandenburg. The massacre was forgotten for the longest time only to resurface when the town's inhabitants started facing their recent past, when forcefully silenced memories about those acts of violence perpetrated in the very last days of the war came alive again. "Nella sabbia di Brandeburgo " (In Brandenburg sand quarry) is a docufilm on forgotten violence, on the silence of guilt and and on accountability in the face of history. The fate of the Italian military internees in World War II was never given enough room in the German and Italian collective memory. Following the surrender of Italy on September 1943 and the breakdown of the alliance between Berlin and Rome, 650,000 Italian military were deported to Germany in bonded labour camps. Fifty thousand of them never came back home. The film narrates their story, drawing material from the bonded labour in Brandenburg. The initiative was promoted by the Italian Cultural Institute in Berlin in collaboration with Out of Focus Filmproduktion. (AGI) . .