Il Cuore nel Pozzo (Italian for The heart in the pit; often reported in Croatian media with the translation Srce u jami and in Slovene Srce v breznu) is a TV movie, produced by state broadcaster RAI, that focuses on the escape of a group of children from Tito's partisans in the aftermath of World War II, as they start an ethnic cleansing of all Italians from Istria and the Julian March.
The German army is losing the war and Tito's Yugoslav partisans are rapidly gaining ground.
Giulia is a woman who earns a living by singing in a tavern in an unnamed village in what appears to be an ethnically Italian area of Istria.
Novak enters a school, interrupting a music lesson of Francesco's mother, and orders all Italian books to be burnt.
At the same time, Francesco's father is threatened by Bostjan, Novak's henchman, and is forced to leave his clinic because he is Italian.
On the trucks they are loaded on, children are separated from their parents, a scene that hints at Nazi concentration camps of the same war.
Believing he cannot take care for him anymore, Francesco tries to bring Carlo back to Don Bruno's orphanage.
The civilians are gunned down by the partisans and thrown in a foiba, into which Francesco climbs down shortly after to find his parents dead, chained in iron wire.
Don Bruno, Anja and Ettore hide all the children, hoping that Novak will believe they have left to Italy.
Novak, again not falling for Don Bruno's bluff, orders to set fire to the gasoline; the children have to exit, and Anja is recognized by Bostjan and captured for being a quisling.
Francesco confronts Walter, a friend of his parents, who is still collaborating with the partisans; however, it turns out that he has been kept in the dark about Novak's ethnic cleansing.
Ettore, disguised with a partisan's uniform, starts pouring gasoline through the base, taking advantage of the fact that most soldiers are drunk.
While Novak is interrogating Don Bruno, Ettore ignites the gasoline, causing a series of chain explosions in the base's weapon caches.
Giulia is finally reunited with her son Carlo, and together with Don Bruno, Ettore, Anja, Francesco and other children they take refuge in an abandoned coastal battery.
They escape from the partisans' pursue by using a rope to reach the sea, but, to buy time and seal the door behind them, Giulia leaves them and surrenders to Novak.
The children have to waste precious time as Ettore bears them out of the minefield, and are eventually cornered by Novak's forces.
A group of veterans from campaigns in Greece and Albania, they were betrayed by a band of partisans who had asked them to join the resistance, and killed them with a machine gun as soon as they had handed over their arms.
Ettore, after remembering them, takes back his guns from a cache he had left in a building close to his comrades' graves, and symbolically returns to be a soldier.
Anja, shocked by the memories of her rape by Bostjan that have come back, tries to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff, but Ettore succeeds in dissuading her.
Ettore orders Novak and his men to drop their weapons, that are picked up by three Italian soldiers that Francesco had just stumbled upon.
Ettore and Francesco find Anja and the other children in a long line of refugees bound for a merchant ship that will bring them back to Italy.
Whether a neutral point of view being captured is dubious, as the concept of Italian fascism and its association with German Nazism and their crimes in the region are only vaguely mentioned in this war drama.
The movie was also used by Slovene and Croatian nationalistic movements, which claimed that the production was the "typical" Italian point of view about the problem.
The Yugoslav partisans are attributed a large number of negative traits: in order of appearance, they: The slavs presented in a better light were Anja, girlfriend of an Italian soldier, and a few other minor characters.
Ettore, shaved, wearing a clean uniform of the Alpini corps, still carrying his rifle, arrives at home.
However, in 1945 Istria was not under the control of the Kingdom of Italy, but was directly ruled by Nazi Germany as part of the Operational Zone Adriatic Coast.
The choice of the more politically neutral monarchic flag seems a way to hide the fact that Italians were subordinate allies of Nazi Germany.
Some Italians from Istria have pointed out that Yugoslav partisans did not embark in mass deportations during the day, but targeted specific persons and kidnapped them during the night.