Bruno And Daniele Segre they had the same surname, but were not related. Bruno was partisanjournalist, lawyer And politic. Daniel was one of the masters of Italian real cinema. Today both are no longer here. They died just days apart earlier this year. But from the filmed conversations between the two a new story was born documentary which will be presented as a national preview at the cinema Massimo in Turin on 25 April: “Bruno Segre – the man who doesn’t give up”. A work that retraces the 105 years of life of the lawyer Segre, whose personal history is intertwined with the most important stages of the Italian twentieth century. From the Resistance to the battles for conscientious objection and for divorce.
Bruno Segre never gave up. From a young age when he was banned from practicing as a lawyer due to racial laws. In those days, as she loved to say, when he saw the writing “Long live the King” he added an O to compose the writing “Long live the Reo” as a sign of protest. It was arrested by fascists but he escaped and joined the Resistence in the Piedmont mountains. Battle name: Elio. After the Liberation, he was finally able to work as a lawyer. One of his first trials saw him alongside Pietro Pinna, the first Italian conscientious objector. And then the battle for the divorce in the Seventies when he rented a small plane to drop fifty thousand leaflets from above with the writing: “Divorce does not come from heaven, but from the law of the Hon. Fortune”.
Different battles but united by the “fresh scent of freedom” as the lawyer who was followed by the director’s camera until January 2024, when within a few days both disappeared. And so the film was completed by his son Emanuele Segre and from Alexander Bernard, of the Turin company I Cammelli, with the support of Film Commission Torino Piemonte – Piemonte Doc Film Fund. A posthumous work that is part of that cinema of reality that Daniele Segre created throughout his life. “Meeting and talking about Bruno Segre was a great honor for me – wrote the director in the film’s notes – a decision born after having witnessed his speech in Piazza Castello in Turin on the occasion of the celebration of 25 April 2022”. A real shock. As had already happened with many of the subjects of his films. From the Italian ultras told in “Ragazzi di Stadio” (1980), the first documentary on Italian fans, to the miners of Sulcis, from Mirafiori workers at the time of Marchionne’s referendum up to the lawyer Bruno Segre.
“Why don’t you give up?” the director asked the lawyer. “I’m not giving up because it seems right to me to fight as long as the forces of nature allow me – he explains in the documentary – I want to stand firm in the face of enemies, opponents of ideas, those who betray, those who speculate on misfortunes. There is a reality of serious and coherent people who do not transform themselves and do not give in to bullying, I have never given in.”
