Presented at the Torino Film Festival, Elisabetta Sgarbi‘s new film, I nomi del Signor Sulcic (The Names of Mr. Sulcic). It’s a journey into memory that tells the story of the tailing of a ghost. Written together with Eugenio Lio, the film plays on the theme of the ever-elusive identity of a mysterious man, just as the classification of the story is elusive, poised between reality, fiction and re-elaboration, not unlike the places in which it is set, namely the border between Italy and Slovenia, Trieste and Ljubljana. The research starts from the synagogue in Trieste – already the central place of Sgarbi’s previous work, Il viaggio della signorina Vila – with a young researcher from Ferrara who asks for news about a missing woman. The rabbi directs her to the cemetery, where she will be welcomed by Roberto Herlitzka, a true guardian of the memory of a people, as well as the first engine of all history. Embellished by two cameos by Claudio Magris and Giorgio Pressburger, the thread of the story unfolds in a labyrinth of false papers, spies, changed identities, reinvented lives, stories of Nazis and even some autobiographical trace of the director, as the photos of his grandparents and the house of Ariosto in Ferrara, in addition to the quote that closes and summarizes the entire film, a phrase that her father often repeated to a dialect poet: “Take away my memory and I will never be old.”
Elisabetta Sgarbi’s new film ‘I nomi del Signor Sulcic’ Presented at the Torino Film Festival
