Il Varco – Once More Unto the Breach

Romano Ismani is haunted by ghosts of the war in Ethiopia fought between 1935 and 1936. His rise within the ranks began there: an unscrupulous fascist soldier ready to do anything. Born to a Russian mother, he had to fight for his career and cover up his suspicious background. In 1941, Nazi Germany declared war on the Soviet Union, with Italy following in its footsteps Ismani is called to the front: a speaker of Russian, he is one of the few Italian soldiers who can communicate with enemy prisoners and the local population. At first the trip to the area taken from the Soviets seems to indicate victory, but Ismani’s certainty begins to fade when he gets to the plains of the Ukraine. On his way to yet another war, he does not feel the enthusiasm of the past. His dreams are full of scenes of massacre in Ethiopia and the Russian fairy-tales his mother used to tell him. Stories that were once reassuring turn into a nightmare. The horrors of war and the ghosts of a hostile land encroach upon him. The fighting intensifies in fall. Working as an interpreter and gathering information directly from locals and prisoners destroy his last hope. Soon it will be winter, and it is clear that an “easy” victory was just an illusion. In a last desperate attempt to escape his fate, Ismani decides to desert. Like thousands of other fellow soldiers, his body will disappear in the frost of Ukrainian winter. Seventy years later, those same places are again the scene of war, destruction and death.