The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

1971 • 94 minutes

About this movie

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and directed by legendary 4-time Oscar Winner Vittorio de Sica (Bicycle Thieves), the film is a beautiful and haunting story of unrequited love set in WWII in Ferrara, Italy. Giorgio is a middle-class Jewish man who is desperately trying to win over Micol, a beautiful and privileged Jewish woman who lives in the grand and secluded estate of Finzi-Contini.

Ratings and reviews

What's amazing and most important in this movie is, this happens in a fascist Italy, where gradually in silence the holocaust is approaching this families. As well the wealthier and the poor. You see the destruction of a Jewish family from their point of view. They play, fall in love, without knowing -as it was in real time, then- that they will end in the gaze chambers.Who could only imagine such a crime. That's what you see in this movie. The incapacity of their ( and ours, if we would have live between 1940-45) imagination that there are going to the dead camps. This psychology was generally understate in all the holocaust movies. I know in literature only one man who succeeded to create the same atmosphere who's name is Applefeld, a holocaust survivor, who-is a writer.