San Sabba

San Sabba is a short film (29‘ 50”) that debates the way we conceive of sites of memorialisation, the way they represent people and who they were in the past. The Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards gave the film the Recognition Award in June 2017 and screened the film at the Awards event in Los Angeles, US, in March 2018.

Building on the method tested with Lunch with Family, this film displays the archival research and personal engagement in the discovery of the Axis Concentration Camp of the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste, Italy, which was active from 1943 to 1945. The film debates the alignment of the Museum of the Risiera di San Sabba to the narrative of the Holocaust, as the site was predominantly used for the detention, interrogation and killing of freedom fighters and their families.

San Sabba aligns with known works within the Holocaust film tradition, as it explores events that took place within the same logic of genocide. Especially relevant are filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (1955), and Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (1985), because they tackle the unseen issues related to the depiction of genocide. Equally important is the work of Jeremy Hicks, The Unseen Holocaust of WWII (2014), which casts questions on the predominantly camps based narrative of the Holocaust. However, San Sabba opens the discussion to the concept of memorialisation in Italy, as the camp in Trieste fails to reveal the documented purpose of the site.

Full screenings of the film took place in York and Athens in 2017, and at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards, in March 2018. Turina presented conference papers and particle screenings at peer-reviewed events in Sheffield, York and Cambridge during 2016-17.