The Gates of Italy
1943 · 21m · Canada
Genres: documentary, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, dark
Benito Mussolini's confused dictatorship leads Italy into the Second World War and toward defeat. The World in Action film examines the dilemma of an impoverished people as their leader falls on July 25, 1943.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1943 NFB doc about Mussolini's collapse sounds like mandatory historical medicine, but it's actually a weird, claustrophobic thing—examining fascism through the eyes of a bewildered populace rather than the usual heroic-resistance angle.
This sits squarely in the World in Action tradition, using archival material and contemporaneous footage to construct a formal historical argument about July 1943 as a turning point; the measured contemplation of a collapsing regime shows real curatorial intelligence about how documentary can interrogate a specific historical moment.
The choice to center an *impoverished people's* confusion rather than military strategy—that angle, that empathetic pivot—does more with wartime newsreel than most bigger-budget productions manage, and it feels like the film knows exactly where its moral weight sits.