Negotiating Amnesia

Negotiating Amnesia is an essay film based on research conducted at the Alinari Archive and the National Library in Florence. It focuses on the Ethiopian War of 1935-36 and the legacy of the fascist, imperial drive in Italy. Through interviews, archival images and the analysis of high-school textbooks employed in Italy since 1946, the film shifts through different historical and personal anecdotes, modes and technologies of representation. Organised in four chapters, (Heritage vs Memory; Photography vs Memory; Monuments vs Memory; Education vs Memory) it aims to reveal the amnesic and racial politics characteristic of this historical period and its aftermath, while exposing public and personal strategies of remembering and forgetting.