If Only I Were That Warrior

Panel discussion with the director and producer (5:30 pm) and film screening (7:15 pm). Directed by Valerio Ciriaci, an Italian filmmaker based in Brooklyn, is a documentary focusing on the Italian occupation of Ethiopia in 1935. Following the construction in 2012 of a monument dedicated to Fascist general Rodolfo Graziani, the film addresses the unpunished war crimes he and others committed in the name of Mussolini’s imperial ambitions. The stories of three characters, filmed in present day Ethiopia, Italy, and the United States, take the audience on a journey through the living memories and the tangible remains of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia — a journey that crosses generations and continents to today, where this often overlooked legacy still ties the fates of two nations and their people.

The film has garnered various prizes at a number of Festivals and critical acclaim, particularly for the complex way in which it reflects on and narrates the colonial past of Italy and the atrocities committed. Atrocities that cannot simply be relegated to a past safely in the distance. This past June, it was awarded the Golden Globe of the Italian Foreign Press Association.

“The past will have been worked through only when the causes of what happened then have been eliminated. Only because the causes continue to exist does the captivating spell of the past remain to this day unbroken.”  Teddy Adorno