Lunch with family

Lunch with Family is a short film (30’) on postmemory that was shortlisted in the Inspiration category at the AHRC Research in Film Awards held at BAFTA in London in 2016. Judges thought the film to be "visually and thematically engaging and called it strong".

The film reveals the tension between Slav-silenced history in Trieste and its impact on personal life and identity in a city-symbol on the former Iron Curtain, in Italy. The film intertwines the author's own story with the history of forced Italianisation of half a million Slavs, their persecution, their organisation in anti-Fascist groups, and the final attempt to delete this ethnic group, which, in Trieste in 1918, was more substantial than in Ljubljana – the capital of Slovenia.

As part of the wider discourse of postmemory, the films aligns with the work of other scholars: Anne Karpf's The War After: Living with the Holocaust (1997) and Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (2004), but also Eva Hoffman's After Such Knowledge. However, Lunch with Family goes further. It uncovers the long history of resistance and the fight for the existence of a community that does not see its history acknowledged in Italy.

Based on interdisciplinary research, archival material and interviews, the film establishes the use of research-by-practice on film as an adequate epistemological methodology to uncover long-buried events and to explore the loop of existential questions the situation provoked and continues to stir in Trieste's Slav inhabitants. A paper published in Screenworks (Vol.8, No.1) in January 2018 explored the context, methods and outcomes of the research enquiry, and Turina presented conference papers and screenings at events in Sheffield, York and Cambridge during 2016-17.