In Fascist Italy, in the midst of the burning world war, my grandmother Barbro Blume travels back and forth across Europe by train. In Italy, she meets the futuristic artist Gino Gonni.
The security services follow the couple’s meetings, and documents are exchanged at Cafe Grecco in Rome. Gino is a skilful forger of Mussolini’s signature, he is also a provocateur without limits. My grandmother had many unexpected sides, in letter conversations and books new pieces are added to the puzzle of a life far beyond the ordinary in the middle of Europe’s finer artistic circles.
Documents from the Italian archives reveal things my grandmother never talked about, Gino gets a multi-year prison sentence for spying. Barbro is wanted on suspicion of smuggling secret documents.
A spy story about my grandmother Barbro, a film about love, art, fascism and courage.
The film will explore questions of memory, identity and the writing of history: what we choose to recount, what we repress, what goes untold and what is lost. At the same time, I wish to draw parallels with our own era, in a media landscape characterised by uncertainty regarding sources, origins and what is fabricated or generated. The film is not intended to provide simple answers, but rather to encourage the audience to form their own interpretation of a historical sequence of events.
The project has received support from the Swedish Arts Council, and a script and development trip was made to Italy, autumn 2024.
