Primo Levi's Journey(La strada di Levi)

Name: Primo Levi's Journey
Genre: Documentary, War

Italy · 2006
1h 31m
Director Davide Ferrario
Starring Andrzej Wajda, Mario Rigoni Stern, Chris Cooper, Umberto Orsini
Genre Documentary, War

In February, 1945, Primo Levi (1919-1987) and other Auschwitz survivors set off for home. The journey took more then eight months. Sixty years later, a film crew retraces Levi's steps. Levi's words, mainly from "The Truce" (1963), tell us what he experienced. In turn, we see Poland's hollow post-war factories, nationalism in the Ukraine, Soviet-style Communism in Belarus, the abandoned town of Prypiat (Chernobyl), poverty and emigration from Moldavia, Italian factories in Romania, and on across Hungary and Slovakia to Munich where Levi's rage found no listeners. Then home to Turin. An aged Mario Rigoni Stern remembers his friend. What has changed? Some issues of the war remain unsettled.

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Village Voice by

Primo Levi's Journey is almost willfully opaque about the actual circumstances of Primo Levi's journey. Who exactly was this man we're meant to be paying homage to, and why did it take him so long to get home?

Salon by Andrew O'Hehir

Primo Levi's Journey is a profound meditation on the unevenness of history, reminding us -- as Faulkner once remarked -- that the past not only isn't dead, it isn't really past at all.

L.A. Weekly by Ella Taylor

Fascinating.

The Hollywood Reporter by Frank Scheck

A rather unfocused but ultimately provocative portrait of Eastern Europe.

New York Daily News by Jack Mathews

The film lacks a certain coherence, and Levi - one of Italy's most important postwar writers - is mostly relegated to an excuse for a sociopolitical travelogue.

The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis

Vividly impressionistic and delightfully curious.

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

Exquisitely shot and the dark poetry of Levi's words, read at intervals throughout the film, is brought to haunting life by a suitably weary-sounding Chris Cooper.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

For while the idea of comparing the Europe of 60 years ago to the Europe of today sounds didactic, the results are anything but. Ferrario turns out to have a delicate, unforced eye for elegant counterpoints, and his style unobtrusively draws you into the journey.