The Last Time We Were Children

Rome, the summer of 1943. Four children play at war in the street while the real war goes on above and bombs fall. Italo is the son of a fascist official. Cosimo's father is in confinement. Vanda lives in an orphanage and is devout. Riccardo is the child of a well off Jewish family. There is an oath between the four. On 16 October the Germans raid the ghetto and take Riccardo along with more than a thousand others. The three who remain set out without telling anyone; they will persuade the Germans to give their friend back. Along the road there are scattered soldiers, deserters and hungry villages. Claudio Bisio directs; it is his first film as director. He wrote the screenplay with Fabio Bonifacci. The source is Fabio Bartolomei's novel. Its ground is real; the round up from the Rome ghetto on 16 October 1943 was one of the largest single deportations in Italy. The narrative proceeds from the children's viewpoint and they do not understand what has happened; the film keeps that gap deliberately. Its form sits between comedy and tragedy; the register is kept deliberately light and changes in the last section. Most of the child actors had not acted before. The period design and the rural landscape work inside the narrative. Its limit is approach; the subject is heavy and the comic register will strike some viewers as unsuitable. Another limit is structure; the road section is long and the plot thin. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian cinema and war narratives from a child's viewpoint. Who it is not for: the register is uneven, the ending bitter, and the historical context thinly given.