In 1937, following an attempted assassination of General Graziani, thousands of Ethiopians were imprisoned or forcibly sent into exile. Among them was an Ethiopian nobleman who died on Asinara, a remote island off the coast of Sardinia. Nearly 80 years later, a photograph found in their mother’s archives leads three siblings to the island in search of his grave. Along the way, they meet a researcher, a baker, a centenarian Sardinian, and a guide from the Asinara National Park. Together, they uncover a little known history of colonial violence, exile, and confinement.
Country
FranceYear
2025Length
37'
Category
DocumentarySynopsis
Biography
Sarah Nouvellon is a Franco-Ethiopian journalist with a personal and professional commitment to questions of detention and human rights. Together with her brother, she co-produced A Place in the Italian Sun, a documentary retracing the story of their great-grandfather, deported to the Asinara prison camp in Italy, where he died. That same commitment drives her work at Prison Insider, an NGO that documents prison conditions in the world.
Statement
L’archivio che non c’è is a festival section curated in collaboration with the Amilcar Cabral Library in
Bologna. It was created out of a desire to bring attention to archives that exist in conditions of precarity –
whether as a result of erasure, difficulties in preservation, or deliberate destruction – as well as archives
that have emerged from forms of activism, from the need to collect and preserve testimonies, and from
other circumstances that we cannot, and do not wish to, define in advance, leaving the field open to
multiple perspectives.
Missing archives, scattered archives, archives to be recovered and reclaimed, particularly through
postcolonial and decolonial perspectives. This year, the section presents the documentary A Place in the
Italian Sun by Sarah Nouvellon and Menelik Nouvellon, in collaboration with the association From Oblivion
to Memory.
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