Brutto, sporco e col naso adunco

About this movie

Officially, no encyclopedia or history of Italian cinema reports the existence of films, documentaries, animated shorts, and newsreels from the Istituto Luce with anti-Semitic content. So, was "the strongest weapon" not used by the fascist regime against the Jews, unlike Goebbels' Nazi propaganda? In reality, an unofficial and never official anti-Semitic cinema did exist, and after 80 years, it is now possible to define which works were these, including fiction films, documentaries, and newsreels, based on research conducted by author and researcher Luca Martera. With the help of narrator Carla Oppo, the special "Ugly, Dirty, and Hook-Nosed. Anti-Semitic Italian Cinema (1910-1943)"-airing Wednesday, May 28, at 9:10 PM on Rai Storia-analyzes characters, lines, and situations, starting with Italian silent cinema, which already contained, in embryonic form, places, prejudices, and stereotypes about Jews that reflected traditional Catholic anti-Judaism and political anti-Semitism on both the right and left in liberal Italy. With the introduction of sound in film in the early 1930s, Mussolini understood its importance for propaganda purposes, and through his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano and the fascist leader Luigi Freddi, he guided its purpose in newsreels and films, made before, during, and after the racial laws of 1938, up until the fall of Fascism, by a significant number of established intellectuals loyal to the regime, including journalists, writers, directors, and documentary filmmakers. The authors of the research, along with Holocaust historian Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, and the curator and director of the film heritage at the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome, Steve Della Casa and Maria Assunta Pimpinelli, will explain who these authors were and what their anti-Semitic works were.

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