Le soldatesse

In 1942, the Italian lieutenant Martino (Tomás Milián) receives orders in occupied Greece to escort 15 women to Italian army brothels in Albania. Accompanied by a sergeant (Mario Adorf) and a fascist Blackshirt major, he crosses the country with the women, learning of their problems and despair, and falls in love with the forced prostitute Eftichia (Marie Laforêt). LE SOLDATESSE was one of the few films of the 1960s to critically address Italy’s role in World War II: The film opens with a flashback to the Italian invasion of Greece in October 1940 and depicts a massacre carried out by Blackshirts. While this nuanced work, shot in Yugoslavia, found a large audience in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the film was rarely shown west of the Iron Curtain.