The fiction “The little girl with the suitcase” in prime time on Rai1

The fiction “The little girl with the suitcase” in prime time on Rai1

“Seeing this film was emotional, I cried from the first scene to the end, I used up a lot of tissues… The characters you see are believable, my grandmother and my father in particular. The scenes with my dad were the most touching because even though I was very little I have a very clear memory of him, I can smell his cologne when he picked me up”.

Egea Haffner from Bolzano is “the little girl with the suitcase”: a symbolic image of the Julian-Dalmatian exodus and the tragedy of the foibe, crystallized in that photo with the pink and yellow checked dress, the socks with the cuffs and a small suitcase with the writing “Esule giuliana”. The photographer stopped the moment on July 6, 1946, when Egea was 4 years old and left her homeland, Pola, her house and everything she knew, to escape elsewhere. That famous photo was also taken in an exhibition at the Rovereto War Museum.

Egea is now 83 years old, lives in Rovereto and remembers everything, her father Kurt before disappearing forever one morning, taken from home at night: he will be killed by the Yugoslavian Titoites and thrown into the foibe. A tragedy that condemned little Egea and her relatives to escape and exile. Her photo is also the cover of the book The little girl with the suitcase (Piemme, 205 pages, 14 euros) by the writer Gigliola Alvisi. Now her story has become a film for Rai1, sponsored by the National Association of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia and presented at the Circolo Rai in Tor di Quinto in Rome, which will be broadcast on February 10 in prime time, for the Day of Remembrance, and on RaiPlay.

Directed by Gianluca Mazzella, written by Andrea Porporati and produced by Rai Fiction and Clemart, produced by Gabriella Buontempo and Massimo Martino, the film is titled La bambina con la valigia (The Little Girl with the Suitcase), like the book of which it is a free adaptation. The protagonists, interpreters of Egea Haffner, at different ages of her life, are the actresses Petra Bevilacqua (as a child) and Sinéad Thornhill. Sandra Ceccarelli is her grandmother, Sara Lazzaro her aunt Andrea Bosca her father Kurt. Egea is forced to leave her homeland and face an uncertain future in Bolzano, cared for by her grandmother Maria (Ceccarelli) and her aunt Ilse (Lazzaro), who loves her like a daughter. Her real mother, Ersilia, instead chooses to move to Sardinia to open a hairdressing shop and emancipate herself from the Haffner family, by which she has never felt accepted. In Bolzano Egea will grow up, discovering first-hand the drama of uprooting, of the exodus, which involved more than 250 thousand people, from the Julian-Dalmatian and Istrian Italian communities, forced to leave their homes and rebuild a new future.

Egea Haffner also recalls the early years of mistrust in elementary school: “A very austere mother superior once made me take off a dress that my aunt had sewn for me with little organza flowers to put on another girl for a play and she made me change and I was forced to wear a large flannel skirt, and there was also a Doberman. The injustices that you will see in the film really happened because the exiles were not well regarded”. Sandra Ceccarelli: “Grandma Maria is initially optimistic and confident about the future but is quickly proven wrong. Maria is forced to leave her entire life and her entire past and will never hear from her son again. The mourning process, without seeing the body, is more painful”. Andrea Bosca: “It makes me think that this story tells us that war, from the 900s onwards, falls mainly on civilians, it is not a war between armies. And these are wars that fall especially on children who are deprived of their lives at the beginning. Everywhere in the world today, these civilians, women and children, lose their homes, you don't know who you will find tomorrow and you only want your family. This historical lesson has not yet been understood". Sara Lazzaro: "The aunt is an emotional point of reference and a figure of intermediation. Between her and the child, a beautiful relationship of complicity will be born. This aunt is always very vigilant, she has a great silent strength and a great dedication". Gigliola Alvisi: "Telling this story was a great emotion and a great challenge as a writer. I had never had a witness next to me of the story I was writing. I liked the idea of transmitting this story especially to children". The director notes: "We told this film from the point of view of a child and a girl, a minimalist point of view".