The Child as “custode della memoria futura”: The Man Who Will Come and the Massacre of Marzabotto

By choosing Martina, an 8 year old peasant child, to be the focalizer of the Marzabotto massacre, Diritti makes possible a new historiography, shorn of the ideological appropriations to which this atrocity had lent itself over the years. In her determination to save her newborn brother, and her breaking of the fierce silence that she had maintained throughout the duration of the film, Martina signals her will to bear witness to the horror, and to endow her sibling, symbolically the New Man of postwar rebirth, with the power to redeem the course of events by guaranteeing, in Diritti’s words, “che in futuro una cosa del genere non avvenga più.