The White Line

Cuori senza frontiere / The White Line 

Luigi Zampa, Italy, 1950, 86’

A humane film about the tragedy of a small town on the border between Italy and Yugoslavia being split in half by the post-WW II line of demarcation.  

In cooperation with the project ‘EAST—WEST Border through film and history’, which is part of the official programme of the European Capital of Culture GO! 2025. Followed by a presentation of Kinoatelje and Otok Institute’s projects that are part of the official GO! 2025 programme. 

 At the border between Italy and Yugoslavia, after World War II, the Allied Commission draws the line that divides a town in two. Within hours, the inhabitants must choose which side to take. Many dramas arise (especially for the children of the village), and conflicts emerge. A farmer has his house on one side but his field on the other. A young man has his beloved on the other side of the town. The children are scattered everywhere, unable to come to terms with such a cruel change. The film is a sort of neorealist melodrama, featuring Gina Lollobrigida in one of the main roles at the dawn of her career. 

“As recounted by Triestine film critic Tullio Kezich, who served as the film’s production secretary and also had a small part as a Yugoslav lieutenant on the International Commission, the script was inspired by a topical issue: the images of the Gorizia cemetery split in two by the border. It was decided, however, to shoot it (in 1949) in Santa Croce, Monrupino and the surrounding area, a Karst landscape that sixty years ago looked very different from what it is today, a rugged and bare and bristling scenery, very suitable for strengthening dramatic representation. What were the reasons for choosing the Karst as the location for The White Line, a low-budget film that, like other contemporaries, could be shot mostly in the studio or around Rome? In 1949 we were in the midst of the Cold War and in the throes of the Trieste issue. In that context the Karst (which, by the way, was an unprecedented film location), already fixed in the collective imagination, and precisely with those connotations of rugged and rocky landscape, as a place of the Great war, came to assume a high symbolic value. A strongly evocative, sacralized place that, thirty years later, was being violated and divided by a rigid border.” – Carlo Gaberscek, Messaggero Veneto 

Luigi Zampa 

Italian filmmaker born in 1905. Noted as one of the first Italian neorealist film makers, he subsequently diverged from other neorealists by turning his gaze to aspects of Fascist Italy and explicitly dealing with Italy under Mussolini’s regime in five of his films realised between 1947 and 1962. His wartime experiences had a particularly strong influence on his acclaimed anti-war film To Live in Peace (Vivere in pace,1947). In the 1960s, Zampa reverted to more commercially oriented works that had marked the beginning of his career. By 1979, he had created an impressive body of work totalling 38 titles.