The Garden That Doesn't Exist

Once upon a time there was a garden, a place of pilgrimage, a safe haven: it's The Garden of the Finzi Continis, that came to life in Giorgio Bassani's 1962 bestseller recounting the rise of fascism in Italy and the disappearance of a Jewish family from Ferrara. Sixty years later, in The Garden That Doesn't Exist, reality and fiction come together once again, as the documentary plays with history, the book and the characters from the novel, by making it resonate with the imaginations of viewers and readers of yesterday and today, for whom the fictional space of the garden is so tangible that it becomes a physical space