Fascism in the Family

Our film for May is Fascism in the Family the story of one woman’s search for the truth about her Fascist Grandfather against the return of the far right in Italy.  

Altrincham Film Club was founded by a group of keen film fans, including Mark Elliot, Editor of Fascism in the Family…

“Most of my day job involves editing television programmes and films, and to view ‘work in progress’ we used to make a DVD and send it to the bosses.  Altrincham Film Club was born after I’d edited a couple of Feature Films and had an arrangement with the manager of the Apollo in Altrincham; he allowed me to use his ‘state of the art’ digital projector to view my DVDs in the cinema before opening to the public, a rare chance to preview my films on the big screen!”   

Fascism in the Family, a film from Al Jazeera:
The word Fascism is often used to describe the extreme nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiments that seem to be on the rise across the world. But what are the similarities between today’s far-right movements and the brutal ideology that was born in Italy a century ago? In this film, Italian-born journalist and Al Jazeera senior presenter, Barbara Serra, examines her own family’s links to Benito Mussolini’s regime to see if Fascism really is resurfacing in Italy today. Barbara’s grandfather was the fascist mayor of a key mining town in Sardinia which was used as a place of exile and punishment for political dissidents and Prisoners of War. While tracing back her family’s involvement in the regime, Barbara also discovers a direct link between her grandfather and Germany’s Nazi leadership – a revelation made even more poignant by the fact that Barbara’s young son is half Jewish. How much does its fascist past influence Italy’s current political situation? By speaking to Far-Right leader Matteo Salvini and Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre among others, this film examines the current anti-immigration sentiment, rising intolerance and the attacks on a free media to see if these are warnings that the country where the word Fascism was coined is indeed bound to repeat its history.