ITALY: Film director Spike Lee announces his next project about an all-black Division of the American army fighting in Italy during World War II

Hollywood has mostly ignored the role played by black American soldiers during World War II, but director Spike Lee is about to set the record straight. His next film will tell the story of a group of soldiers with the racially segregated, all-black 92nd Buffalo Division which fought against Nazi occupation in Italy in 1944-45. The film, based on James McBride's novel "Miracle at St. Anna", will be shot in Tuscany, where the American soldiers found themselves trapped in the mountains behind enemy lines, living with locals who had never seen a black person before. "We always had this paradox of African-American soldiers, negroes and black people who feel they must defend their country, they must fight for democracy and yet at the same time they are considered second-class citizens," Lee said in an interview in Rome on Tuesday (July 3), where he stopped to present his next work before going on location scouting in Tuscany. "So many soldiers who fought in whatever war you want to name, when the war was over they were still going back to being second-class citizens, not someone who has full rights", he said. Racial issues are a favourite theme for Lee, the director of "Malcom X", "Do The Right Thing", and an acclaimed 2006 documentary on how Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. For him, the contribution made by black troops to America's war effort against the Nazis was all the more remarkable given that back home they were still suffering racial discrimination. Lee said he had always wanted to make a film about World War II and had been looking for an opportunity to shoot in Italy. He said the film would have a "great international cast" of U.S., Italian and German actors, but did not elaborate. "My belief is that World War II is the last war that America was right about. Anything after that, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq -- they were wrong ... wrong," he said. McBride's book, based on a true story, focusses on four Buffalo soldiers, and the friendship between one of them and a six-year-old Italian orphan. The village mentioned in the book's title, Sant'Anna di Stazzema, was the site of an infamous massacre on Aug. 12, 1944 when Nazi troops rounded up and killed 560 civilians. Nearly a quarter of the 15,000 Buffalo soldiers, many of whom had little education and could not read or write, were killed during the campaign in Italy. Two of them were only awarded Medals of Honour 50 years later, said William Perry, an 82-year-old veteran of the division who was 19 when he fought in Tuscany. "I'm just happy to be here now and I think something good will come out of it', Perry said. 'I don' think there's anything derogatory, I just hope it will bring some things to light.' 'They were those who liberated us, the Americans, they brought us freedom' said Enrico Pieri, who was the only survivor of the massacre at Sant'Anna di Stazzema among his family, when asked about how it was living with the African American soldiers.

ITN Source | July 12, 2007

Tags:. .actors. .documentary. .considered. .suffering. .german