CBA TRIESTE · The Cinematic Battle for the Adriatic: Films, Frontiers, and the Trieste Crisis

The project will analyse cinematic practices related to the Trieste Crisis (1945-54), a diplomatic struggle over the Italo-Yugoslav border at the outset of the Cold War, which remains the region’s most controversial issue due to the violence it invoked. Central to the conflict’s soft power dimension, both countries produced a collection of films about these events, which coincided with the establishment of film festivals as important geo-political events. Taking festivals as lieux de mémoire, the project will explore how the conflict’s cinematic representation (specifically the foibe massacres, the Italian exodus, the fascist crimes and the anti-fascist struggle) has been employed to construct desirable cultural memories related to its national and ideological concerns. It will compare Italian and Yugoslav (Slovenian, Croatian) perspectives, by investigating three levels of cinematic action: 1) film production, 2) film festival circulation, and 3) film reception through awards and press reviews. It will compare two periods, both marked by higher interest in this topic: the Trieste Crisis itself and the period following the establishment of Giorno del Ricordo in Italy in 2004. By including historical and contemporary viewpoints, the study will examine how the narrativization of these events has evolved from the early Cold War to the present day. The project will result in a digital archive presenting: 1) film database with contacts of institutions housing the films, 2) film analysis in the given political and social context 3) selection of films and archival documents. The project will offer the first analysis of this film corpus and make widely accessible a collection of related cinematic cultural heritage. In engaging with an interdisciplinary approach, it will provide a contribution to the study of cinema, film festivals and cultural memory, and a practical toolkit for researchers and cultural programmers, which can act as a model for other, comparable studies.