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Title: A Name That Is Not Mine
Runtime: 12 min
Country: Italy
Director: Dario Piana
Placement: Honorable Mention
Competition: June, 2025
Synopsis: One only has to walk through the streets of any Italian city to realise how many Nazi-related signs still f ill the walls we pass. Mostly swastikas. So we asked ourselves: is it possible that there are still people today, in the 21st century, who are attracted to that symbol? Is it possible that there are still those who find fascination in a swastika, a symbol that carries so much pain? So we thought that in order to tell what horrors lay behind the swastika and what nefarious deeds had been committed in the shadow of that sign, we needed to tel l the story of those who had experienced those horrors first-hand. This is where we thought of Irena Sendler, the Polish nurse, also known as ‘the Schindler of Warsaw’, who saved almost 3,000 Jewish children from the ghetto.
We are convinced that, never before as today, it is necessary for us to make ourselves the living memory of that past, especially now that the direct protagonists are disappearing and anti-Semitism is returning even more fiercely in the daily news around the world, although it has never disappeared completely,
unfortunately.
There is a need for children to know those stories, to imagine the lives of those bodies piled on top of each other outside a hut in one of the concentration camps hat they are shown, especially on Holocaust Memorial Day.