O Belgio mio

They arrived in Belgium in the early fifties. They were three or four years old : their father was a miner, who was enlisted in the « Battle for Coal », declared by a country that had too few volunteers willing to face the hell of the mine. Their childhood memories were marked by the fear of accidents and disasters.

A man and a woman : Toni’s family came from Sicily, Serafina’s from Sardinia. Today they are no longer truly Italian, and yet not quite Belgian. Beyond their different nationalities, they are, first and foremost, deeply attached to their adoptive region (the central area, Hainaut) despite its run-down economic state. New citizens with more than one facet to their identity, they tell their story of immigration and integration. She teaches history, he is a cultural facilitator : they each in their own way keep alive an active memory, far removed from nostalgia.

Through archive material (which also sheds light on the « Italian » viewpoint on emigration), narrative passages, landscapes, moments taken from a community’s collective self-expression and, above all, trough the testimony of Serafina and Toni, this film attempts to show how keeping memory alive can also be a powerful means of confronting reality.