"La strada di Levi" by Davide Ferrario

Something too strong in those Primo Levi's words: "we have always a truce. Our whole life is a kind of truce: truce from the work, from the things we're usaully doing. Sometimes I thought that the truce was coming from the Holocaust". At the end of the movie, when the out-voice was saying about his suicide (he could not live with that, how may he do it?), Levi told his recurrent dream: he's with his family while a dinner, and, suddenly, the scene fall in a grey coulour. Grey like the Auschwitz's walls, the prisonner's suits. The truce is maybe the regained normal life, Auschwitz is the reality behind it. The movie retraces the long journey in 1945-46 from Auschwitz to Turin - an unusual road : several months around the east communist countries - but in 2006, in the post-communist era. Something has changed, something not. The images and the Levi's text are not always in symbiosis. The most of time their correspondance is just suggested. Thus Levi's account about a girl he loved, found by chance in a train station in Moldavia: the images were showing the train station today (like a documentary, which in fact the movie is), where a girl is sitting on a bench, and a yong girl is saying goodbye with her hands out from the window in a outward-bound train. That's what I call poetry: something leaves (on purpose) undone. The sense is to make, to perform. Sometimes the movie is funner; sometimes is sadder: we see an old woman in the country, widow since 1944, and who believes being happy. Levi didn't talk about her. But maybe he saw her, just for a while, in the same house, alone, happy.

Many other things should be said starting from the movie. But I would like to concentrate to Levi's word. The truce is normal life. If "To keep silent is forbidden, to speak is impossible" (Elie Wiesel) we have to understand the reason why is not possible to blame the Levi's final act, his jump into the stairwell. Because the Holocaust's horror is out of bounds, out of imagination. We could neither judge it nor undestand it. The one who beared witness, could not recognize the normal life anymore. He has to continue to escape. Even if we are next to him, even if it's important for collectif memory, the witness continue his trauma for his act of bearing witness: it's never ending.