original title:
Rudolf Jacobs, l’uomo che nacque morendo
directed by:
cast:
Carlo Prussiani, Marina Piperno, Alessandro Cecchinelli
producer:
production:
country:
Italy
year:
2011
film run:
96'
format:
colour
status:
Ready (24/07/2011)
festivals & awards:
Rudolf Jacobs was a captain in the German navy during the Second World War. Dispatched after 8th September 1943 to the Ligurian coast, he lived in a villa on the hills around Lerici, from where he was in charge of building sea defences against a feared landing by allied forces. Middle-class, he was born in 1914. Those who knew him say he was tall, bony, kind, with a good knowledge of Italian. In the surrounding villages it was soon rumoured that a German was confiscating foodstuffs from unscrupulous stockpilers to distribute them to the starving population. The local partisan squads started to monitor him. They let him know that some fascists managing a local co-operative (contracted to build bunkers along the coast) were stealing. Jacobs fired them, installing in their place a moderate fascist suggested to him by the partisan squads. When he revealed he had chosen to join the Resistance, was he aware he had just signed his own death certificate? Most certainly. But it is also possible to think that he wanted to expiate the unbearable guilt of having been himself an instrument of Nazi crimes. The failed assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944, and his belief that his wife and two children had perished in the bombing of Hamburg, gave him the final push. Fighting against a totalitarian state, for a democratic future, seemed to him a must...