Corbari

In September 1943, immediately after the Armistice of Cassibile that surrendered Italy to the Allied forces and caused the Germans to rapidly occupy most of the country, the rebellious twenty-year-old Sirio (aka Silvio) Corbari from the Emilia-Romagna region grabbed a gun and joined the resistance against both the German occupying forces and the fascist militias that supported them. He got his first taste of Nazi blood at the side of the Samoggia gang. After its destruction, Corbari created his own battalion in 1944 that quickly grew famous as the Corbari band, counting up to thirty combatants at the peak of its activities. Described by his friends as brave, impulsive, and always cheerful, Corbari couldn’t care less for the ideological or professional background of his comrades-in-arms. Some were educated communists, some illiterate peasants, some were experienced fighters, many were just enraged, and several were liberated prisoners of war. Corbari’s motto was simple: extreme Nazi terror deserves only extreme violence in response. His modus operandi was even simpler: hit, run, hide, and repeat. Valentino Orsini, best known for his early collaborations with Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, fully embraces this raw simplicity in his straightforward, action-packed tribute to a martyr who died at the age of twenty-two, blending the antifascist political message with the hardboiled tradition of the Italian genre cinema of the moment. (Viennale)