Thursday, 30 January, to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sydney will screen Il respiro di Shlomo (Shlomo’s Breath), a documentary produced by the Fondazione Museo della Shoah in collaboration with Rai Cinema. The film will be in Italian with English subtitles and it recounts the testimony of Shlomo Venezia (1923-2012), a deportee and member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, as told nearly 30 years ago to Holocaust historian Marcello Pezzetti and director Ruggero Gabbai. His story is now preserved in the Memory Archive of the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center (CDEC).

Through Shlomo’s words, the documentary traces his tragic journey from his hometown of Thessaloniki, once one of the largest Jewish communities in the Mediterranean, to the horror of the Auschwitz, Birkenau, Ebensee, and Mauthausen camps, before his liberation and arrival in Italy, first in Udine and later in Rome.

The film explores profound themes such as the loss of one’s community, the pain of separation from loved ones, and the struggle to survive in inhumane conditions. It also reveals how Shlomo, despite the passage of time, struggled to share his story—even with his own children, who only learned of his experiences in adulthood. This powerful documentary offers a moving reminder of the importance of memory and the need to bear witness to one of the darkest chapters of modern history.

Ruggero Gabbai is a photographer with a degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a filmmaker with a degree in Cinematography from Columbia University in New York, where he collaborated with directors such as Milos Forman, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, and Emir Kusturica. Born in Antwerp and raised in Milan, he specializes in documentaries on historical and social themes, focusing on the memory of the Shoah, the Mafia, and marginalized communities. He has directed over 25 documentaries filmed in Italy and around the world, including Memoria (1997), presented at the Berlin Film Festival and winner of numerous international awards, and Io Ricordo, a docu-film on the memory of Mafia victims in Sicily, produced by Gabriele Muccino and Marco Cohen. His works also include The Longest Journey, about the deportation of Italian Jews from Rhodes to Auschwitz, broadcast by RAI for the 2014 International Holocaust Remembrance Day; CityZEN, about Palermo’s Zen neighborhood; Starting Over Again (2016), on the exodus of Egyptian Jews; and Libia: l’ultimo esodo (2017), on the Jewish community of Tripoli until Gaddafi’s rise to power. His most recent work, LILIANA, recounts the testimony of Senator for Life Liliana Segre.

Event is free, but bookings are required (CLICK HERE)