Odessa in Flames

Odessa in Flames (Romanian: Odessa în flăcări) (Italian: Odessa in fiamme) is a 1942 Italian-Romanian film directed by Carmine Gallone.^[1] The film is about the Battle of Odessa in 1941.

The Siege of Odessa was part of The Great Patriotic War area of operations in 1941. The operation was primarily conducted by Romanian forces and elements of the German Army's 11th Army (11. Armee of the Wehrmacht Heer).

Plot

The movie is a Romanian-Italian co-production about the drama of the refugees from Bessarabia (now Moldova) in World War II. It pays homage to the Romanian troops who freed Bessarabia from the Red Army, which occupied it in 1940. The movie won the great prize at the Festival of Venice in 1942. It includes footage from contemporary newsreels, with refugee columns running away.

Maria Cebotari played the role of Maria Teodorescu, an opera singer from Bessarabia, who is in Chisinau with her 8-year-old son at the time of the invasion. The boy is taken somewhere in Odessa. The mother is told that he will be maintained in a camp where he will be educated as a man and a Soviet. To get her son back she agrees to sing Russian songs in theaters and taverns. There, she shares pictures of her past. One such image is found by chance by her husband, who is in the Romanian army with the rank of captain. In the end, the family reunites.

Because of the invasion of Bucharest by Soviet troops in 1944 the movie was banned and the actors were arrested. Many such movies were either destroyed or censored. Nothing was heard of this movie for more than 50 years. However, it was rediscovered in the Cinecittà archives in Rome and was shown for the first time in Romania in December 2006.

References

External links

• Odessa in fiamme on IMDb
• Odessa in Flames is available for free download at the Internet Archive