On the run from Nazis, three Italian Jewish brothers spent months during their childhood hiding in a cave in the Tuscan countryside. Nearly 70 years later, after emigrating to Israel, the three reunite in the country they were forced to abandon and rediscover their hiding place. "For years I've wanted to find that cave, the place to which we owe our lives," says Bubi, the youngest of the trio.
Amid hearty Tuscan meals and sweeping landscapes, the octogenarians' quest unexpectedly swells with humor and clashing memories in Shalom Italia.
Retracing their steps, the brothers in Shalom Italia are as different as can be. Emmanuel, the oldest and a world-renowned anthropologist and archaeologist based in Israel, simply recalls misery and only agrees to the journey to make Bubi happy. "Why search for it? I don't want to remember," he says.
Meanwhile, Andrea, an athletic physicist just two years younger than Emmanuel, remembers an enchanted childhood: "Those were wonderful times. We lived in the woods, played Robin Hood and collected mushrooms. I had fun during the Holocaust."
However, Bubi, 4 1/2 at the time, barely remembers the cave. "I don't know whether family stories and my memories overlapped. It's all a bit vague."
"It's human for our memories--personal or shared--to become a source of our identity," said filmmaker Tamar Tal Anati. "Whether that memory comes from one 'truth' is explored by Bubi, Emmanuel and Andrea. Often it seems any particular moment can only be accurately constructed when everyone is involved, as each person's particular recollection of an event helps piece together a larger mosaic of a shared experience. I hope Shalom Italia will inspire American audiences to reexamine their own stories and history."
Unalike as they are, Bubi, Andrea and Emmanuel are undoubtedly brothers. They bicker over driving directions, recipes and how exactly their time in the cave should be remembered. Probing the boundaries between history and myth, the brothers soon learn their memories are not so easily unraveled. They can't agree whether the family hid valuables with a village neighbor, or whether the bow and arrows they played with in the woods were bought at a store or fashioned by hand. "History is full of doubts," Emmanuel, says, to which Bubi impatiently replies, "You keep doubting and contradicting everything and saying it's not true over and over again."