RUNAWAYS

FUGITIVAS

By Gustavo LENCINA, Misha PIAZZOLLA

PAISA ESTUDIO - as CONS

Drama - Development 2022

Not to die under the Allied advance, three slovenian teenagers (two of 14 year old and one of 17 years old) receive two bicycles and the order to pedal all night to Italy and then try to ship towards America.

    • Year of production
    • 2022
    • Genres
    • Drama, Historical, True Story
    • Countries
    • ARGENTINA
    • Languages
    • SPANISH-ARGENTINE, SLOVENIAN, ITALIAN
    • Budget
    • 3 - 5 M$
    • Duration
    • 100 mn
    • Director(s)
    • Gustavo LENCINA, Misha PIAZZOLLA
    • Writer(s)
    • Gustavo LENCINA, Misha PIAZZOLLA
    • Producer(s)
    • Romina CORONEL (Paisa Estudio)
    • Synopsis
    • A true story

      Irene and Marta have 17 and 14 years old respectively. Anika is 14. They all live in ‘Ziri, a small town in Slovenia. All through the second world war ‘Ziri was occupied alternatively by the Axe soldiers, the partisans and the allied. On each advance every man with fighting capacity was shot or enlisted. On 1945 only child and women survives.

      One day their mothers repair two old bicycles and gave them to the three teenagers. The allied advance raping and killing. They have to pedal to the ports of Italy. Is well known that there they can find ships that takes de war fugitives to América. It’s their only chance to survive.

      After a sad farewell the girls parts. Soon they have to face hunger and then the cold. In a certain moment they see passing by, as in a vision, a line mutilated people of from a bombed town. The landscape is baleful and deeply melancholic. The people pass without even staring at them.

      One night a partisans patrol finds them by surprise. They think this is the end. But the men are overwhelmed with fatigue and they only interrogate them. Then they give them food, two old blankets and they part.

      Then they find a crazy deserter soldier, that can’t find his way back home; an old lady that offers them a soup and a bed asking in return help with the poor harvest of her orchard; many tried to cheat them.

      These brief encounters mix with lapses where they only have themselves. A survivors relationship is born between them. One of them menstruate for the first time and thinks she’s going to die, another one gets weak enough and almost stays blind. The elder tries to fish and see a corpse floating.

      On the edge of the collapse the girls reach the Italian border but they don’t let them in. They find a priest that invites them to a group that is about to cross the mountains to enter through Austria. For that purpose they have to pay to some smugglers that survives by making fugitives cross the border through hidden paths in the mountains.

      There the nature imposes the limits. Full rivers and the coming of the winter, nearby bombing that makes them doubt they can escape on time.

      After many troubles they get to Italy via Austria, but before they can reach the port they are sent to a refugees camp. There they stay with war survivors from all kinds. They have to enter a “?? course” where they have to watch repeatedly terrible documentaries movies about the concentration camps.

      Months pass until they can get on board. Full of desperate for escaping from the camp they part in the only ship that has three free places. They leave thinking they are going to Canada but at the end of the trip they reach Buenos Aires. They don’t know where they are until they hear people speaking a familiar language, and finally they find the Slovenian community flags among the crowd at the port.

      50 years later, an old lady, Anika, closes a drawings book that shows that trip, and it's about to receive her great-grandsons to tell them how they ended