'Seeing Red': Yugo-nostalgia of real and imagined borders

On 3 November 2012, in the Antonio Gandusio Theatre in Rovinj, Croatia, the documentary Vedo Rosso—Anni ’70 tra storia e memoria degli Italiani d’Istria (Seeing Red—the 1970s Between History and Memory Among the Istrian-Italian Community) was shown for the first time.1 The documentary was directed and produced by Sabrina Benussi who experienced that period as a child and a teenager. It is a rather original and somewhat autobiographic attempt to engage with the everyday life of one Italian minority in Socialist Yugoslavia during the 1970s, the last decade of Tito’s regime.2 It is also an attempt, on the part of the author, to provoke among her local community a first self-reflection on those years, on their involvement in the rituals of socialism—the cult of President Tito. Her narrative—marked by a pervasive sense of irony—seeks to probe what it meant to be a member of an Italian minority living in a former Italian territory while simultaneously being embedded in the regime’s cosmopolitan rhetoric.