Produced by National Film and Television School
Filmed in Italy, Israel, Palestine
Languages: Italian, Arabic, Hebrew with English subtitles
Subtitles: Versions with English and Italian subtitles
Letters From Palestine
2011, 35 mins 44 sec
Official selection at Arcipleago Film Festival, Rome, 2012
Shortlisted at Virgin Atlantic Film Festival In The Sky, 2013
Official Selection Human Rights Film Festival Barcelona/ Paris/ NY 2013
We all belong to a past - a past that can bury us unless we excavate it. A journey into the unresolved questions of the Middle Eastern Conflict and into the death of a man in the 1920s who believed in the dream of a land shared by Arabs, Jews and Christians.
Imagine discovering an unsolved family mystery in your great-grandfather's letters - a mystery nobody in your family wants to talk about. My great-grandfather, Angelo Levi Bianchini, set out for Palestine on a diplomatic mission in the 1920s and never came back.
After spending a few months in Palestine, he had become a vocal advocate for Jewish-Arab coexistence but his views were often unpopular. To his ninety year old daughter Angela, my grandmother, the mystery of his death remains an open wound.
This is the story of a journey into the unresolved questions of the Middle Eastern conflict which are still being addressed today, ninety years after my great-grandfather’s journey. In a land divided by a wall that in his time would have been unthinkable, today it seems that his dream has been destroyed forever. But in this ongoing state of conflict - the power of his voice still resonates.