HIDDEN CHILDREN
(Hristo Shopov as Captain Nieder)
ORIGINAL TITLE: La fuga degli innocenti.
YEAR: 2004.
DIRECTED BY: Leone Pampucci.
MAIN CAST: Ken Duken, Max von Sydow, Jasmine Trinca, Ennio Fantastichini, Hristo Shopov, Eliana Miglio, Toni Bertorelli, Ana Caterina Morariu, Zlatil Davidov, Pasquale Esposito, Nino Frassica, Pietro Ghislandi, Alfredo Pea, Tullio Sorrentino, Andrea Tidona and Thomas Trabacchi.
PRODUCED BY: Cecilia Cope, Fanio Petrocchi and Mario Rossini (Red Film - RAI Fiction).
WRITTEN BY: Nicola Caracciolo, Angelo Pasquini, Alessandro Sermoneta and Marco Turco.
ORIGINAL MUSIC BY: Franco Piersanti.
RUNTIME: 200 minutes / 116 minutes (short version).
COUNTRY: Italy.
GENRE: Drama | War.
SYNOPSIS:
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The film is dedicated to the children of Nonantola and to the courage of those who helped in their salvation.
The film is broadly inspired by the true story of a group of Jewish children, many of them orphans, who in their attempt to escape Nazi prosecution were welcomed in Nonantola, near Modena in Italy.
In the spring of 1941 the Jewish community clandestine rescue network tries to move around fifty children from different countries of Central Europe to Croatia. However, the children are the main objective of SS Colonel Krieg, who receives special orders from Berlin to capture the kids.
While waiting to leave to Palestine, the young fugitives are welcomed and helped by Abraham, a rabbi from Zagreb, but after the invasion of Yugoslavia by German forces, Abraham is arrested in the ghetto during a raid led by SS Captain Nieder (Hristo Shopov), the German officer who is entrusted to capture the group. Before deportation, the rabbi pleads his son Joseph, a teacher at a Hebrew school, to save the children who are temporarily hidden in a downtown warehouse.
In a hostile environment the group of Jews goes on a desperate escape and passthrough several European countries in their dangerous efforts to elude Nazi forces.
In their escape, the children will be helped by a few locals of the different cities, but their situation worsens when Italy sign the Armistice of 1943 and the Germans take control of the country. Now nothing shall keep Nieder from fulfilling his mission.
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