This page has been set up to share thoughts, news and updates regarding The Houses of Micòl initiative; a project spearheaded by Ferrara La Citta del Cinema and funded by the CERV lump sum grant by the European Commission under the rubric of European Remembrance 2023. The mission is to revive the stories of Jewish girls and women who’s otherwise thriving lives were decimated by the horrors of the holocaust. The name of the project is borrowed from the protagonist of Giorgio Basini’s novel “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” subsequently made into a celebrated film by Vittorio de Sica in 1970. Both book and film tell the story of the lives of an upper-class Jewish family living under the increasingly antisemitic vice of Fascist Italy.
Partners in the project include: Ferrara La Citta del Cinema / Scuola Vancini; Warsaw Film School, Act; ISCO; CSCO; Fondazione Bassani; MEIS and; last but not least, Prague Film School. Together, the institutions will locate nodal points in their respective countries where memories of life before the holocaust can be resurrected and retold. These memories will be conveyed through the medium of cinema in a series of short documentaries posted on an Internet platform functioning as an interactive map documenting “the Houses of Micòl.” The project will also implement a series of seminars and workshops on the theme of memory in high schools in the countries of the participating countries and culminate with a Houses of Micòl – Festival of Memory, to be held in Ferrara in 2025.
Milan Kundera writes, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Le Case di Micòl is project against forgetting, so that evil will not be acquitted.
Remembrance Workshop – 9.12.2024 – Prague Film School
International Symposium:
The Importance of Places of Memory for Tourism
22.01.2024 – Prague Film School
On 22th of January, 2024, partnering institutions Prague Film School, Warsaw Film School, ACT, Blow Up Academy, CSCO and ISCO, convened for an online symposium. Each institution updated partners on their respective Micol’s, sharing the stories of their protagonists and how they relate to their cities and tourism in general. CSCO presented the interactive map documenting the Houses of Micol in Europe while experts reflected on the particulars of their own city in relation to the Holocaust and the Houses of Micol initiative.
