October 16th Memorial

On October 16th at 6:00 pm, the Rome Lab will present a film screening dedicated to the memory of the over 2,000 Jewish men, women and children who were rounded up and deported Auschwitz on October 16th, 1943 and during the following 9 months.

The film, “Una Giornata Particolare” by Claudio Della Seta. The film is a narrated journey among a series of home-film shot in the 1920s and 1930s by several members of the Della Seta-Di Segni families in Rome who had acquired one of the first 16 mm. amateur cameras on the market.

After discovering the first reel in his parten’s attic, Claudio Della Seta has tacked down the footage of relatives who had fled to North and Sounth America.

The result of this finding is a work-in-progress that lead to the restoration of the some of the films and the use of short segments as part of a short memorial documentary that traces the lives of the people who appear in this salvaged moving images, many of whom perished in the Holocaust.

The fragments were shot by Salvatore Di Segni in November 1931 and captured a Roman Jewish home where family and friends are celebrating the birth of a new-born. Eighty-four years later, Mirella, one of the children in the film, now a grandmother, answers her granddaughter’s questions, leading her into the events that took away some of her family.

Stories unfold in entering the nuanced world of Roman Jewry. There is Arturo “Luciano” Navarro, an ardent patriot and World War I hero, a Ministry of Agriculture employee who took his life on the day in which the racial laws deprived him of his job; There are Samuele and Giulia Della Seta, who were captured on October 16th, 1943 and assassinated in Auschwitz; and there Claudio Fiorentini, who as a young man entered the Roman resistance participating in the liberation of Rome for which he gave his life.