XXI MittelCinemaFest: COMANDANTE ǀ THE CAPTAIN

At the beginning of World War II, Salvatore Todaro was captain of the Italian Royal Navy submarine Cappellini. In October 1940, while the submarine was cruising in the Atlantic, the silhouette of a merchant ship, the Kabalo, with its lights out and, as it later turned out, a Belgian flag, was seen in the darkness of night, suddenly opening fire on the submarine and its Italian crew. A short but fierce battle ensues, in which Todaro sinks the enemy ship with cannon fire. And then the captain makes a historic decision: to rescue the twenty-six Belgian sailors, doomed to drown in the middle of the ocean, and bring them to the nearest safe harbour, in accordance with the law of the sea. To take the sailors on board, he is forced to sail on the surface for three days, making the submarine visible to enemy forces and risking his own life and that of his men. When asked by the captain of the Kabalo, who landed in the bay of Santa Maria in the Azores, why he had taken such a risk against the orders of his command, Salvatore Todaro replied in the words that would become legendary: "Others, unlike me, do not have two thousand years of civilisation behind them".