Voices of the Italian Imperial Past

The Italian documentary Overseas (Oltremare, 2017) offers an intimate insight into the time of the Italian colonization of East African countries in the years leading to the Second World War by predominantly using archival photographs and videos. The director Loredana Bianconi thus avoids any kind of external comments or explanations of the narrative and lets the colonisers tell the story in their own words. What remains is a linear insight into the everyday life of Italian civilians in African colonies, where they mostly lived their lives not caring about Mussolini’s fascist and irredentist ideas, while the difference between “us” and “them” was relativised. Thereby, the idea of neutrality and apoliticality is questioned on two levels: firstly, on the level of regular Italian people who never explicitly sympathised with the fascist regime, but helped the Italian expansionist tendencies come to life and, secondly, on the level of lmmaking, on which, in this particular case, the director could not create her own imagery in the traditional sense, but conveyed her message through material selection and editing.

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