I Naufraghi di Kerch

On the shores of a vanished sea, the story of the Italians of Crimea and their deportation to the icy Kazakh steppes in 1942 re-emerges, a holocaust whose traces are confused with the portrait of a place and the story of the survivors. The documentary film transports us to Kerch, in the Crimea, where a minority of Italian origin who arrived there during the 1800s, struggles to have their story recognized and told. This community of Italians in 1942 was accused of supporting the fascist regime and having collaborated with the German troops during the occupation of the city. Between 29 and 30 January the Soviet soldiers began the deportation of the Italians. The whole community was put on freight trains for the icy Kazakh steppes. The first wagon was unhooked on the Aral Sea. At the time the inhabitants of those places called it the sea, it was the fourth largest reservoir in the world, and supplied the whole Soviet Union with fish. Only a few, after Stalin’s death, managed to return to Kerch.