FILM SCREENING TONIGHT
TUESDAY,
NOVEMBER 27TH
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
at Seton Hall University
Jubilee Hall Auditorium at Seton Hall
Giorgio Bassani’s
acclaimed novel (made into an Academy Award—winning film in 1970) of unrequited love and the plight of the Italian Jews
on the brink of World War II has become a classic of modern Italian literature.
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The Garden of the Finzi—Continis
is a richly evocative and nostalgic depiction of prewar Italy. The narrator, a young middle-class Jew in the Italian
city of Ferrara, has long been fascinated from afar by the Finzi-Continis, a wealthy and aristocratic Jewish family, and especially
by their daughter Micol. But it is not until 1938 that he is invited behind the walls of their
lavish estate, as local Jews begin to gather there to avoid the racial laws of the Fascists, and the garden of the Finzi-Continis
becomes an idyllic sanctuary in an increasingly brutal world.
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Years after the war, the narrator returns
in memory to his doomed relationship with the lovely Micol, and to the predicament that faced all the Ferrarese Jews, in this
unforgettably wrenching portrait of a community about to be destroyed by the world outside the garden walls.
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