This space has been created to share reflections, news, and updates about The Houses of Micol, an initiative promoted by Ferrara La Città del Cinema and funded by the European Union through the CERV – European Remembrance 2023 programme.
The aim of the project is to revive the stories of Jewish girls and women whose vibrant lives were shattered by the horrors of the Holocaust.
The title of the project is inspired by the protagonist of Giorgio Bassani’s novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, later adapted into the celebrated film directed by Vittorio De Sica in 1970. Through the story of an upper-class Jewish family living under the tightening grip of Fascist antisemitism, Bassani offers an intimate portrait of a world on the verge of destruction.
Today, The Houses of Micol takes up that legacy and transforms it into a collective journey of active remembrance, where cinema becomes a tool of knowledge, dialogue, and testimony.
The project brings together an international partnership including Ferrara La Città del Cinema / Scuola Vancini, Warsaw Film School, ACT, ISCO, CSCO, Fondazione Bassani, MEIS, and Prague Film School. Together, these institutions are identifying symbolic locations in their respective countries where memories of Jewish life before the Holocaust can be rediscovered and retold through a series of short documentary films.
These stories will be collected on a digital interactive platform, a living map of “The Houses of Micol,” allowing audiences to explore the geography of memory through the lens of cinema.
At the same time, the project includes seminars and workshops in high schools across the participating countries, engaging younger generations in reflecting on the importance of memory as a civic and cultural responsibility.
The journey will culminate in Ferrara in 2025 with the Festival of Memory – The Houses of Micol, an event dedicated to dialogue between cinema, art, and European remembrance.
As Milan Kundera wrote,
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
The Houses of Micol is a project against forgetting — because remembering means ensuring that evil is never acquitted.