Bread Peace Freedom 1943/1945

Passionate testimonies still emerge from the memory of the Resistance: the film, made in collaboration with the trade union movement, collects some of them to delve deeper into the history of workers' participation in the liberation of Italy from Nazi-fascist rule. It is a struggle that explodes from underground already in 1943, with fascism still in power, when at 10:00 on March 5, in Turin, the Fiat workers go on strike. The demands concern wages, but also an increase in bread rations and then peace and freedom. Starting from those stories, the memories recall other struggles. A year later, the general strike spreads throughout northern and central Italy controlled by the Nazis and their fascist allies of the Republic of Salò. And the voices of the witnesses tell it with Piedmontese, Ligurian, Lombard, Venetian, Emilian, Tuscan inflections citing historical places of workers' struggles: Mirafiori, Lingotto, Rv and Carello in Turin, Breda and Caproni in Sesto San Giovanni, Cantieri navali San Giorgio in Genoa, Manifattura tabacchi in Florence. From the reenactments also emerges the harsh Nazi-Fascist repression: the arrests, the deportations to German concentration camps, the shootings. It is the struggle that continues very hard, workers and farmers together with the partisans in the mountains, until April 1945, the liberation, the hope of a different country. The testimonies - all unpublished - alternate with significant archive film material, photographic and iconographic documents.