Renato Portesi

Thirty years after Primo Levi's death, Rai Cultura assembles a portrait that refuses to reduce him to the single label of Holocaust witness. Ten scholars, journalists and friends - among them the historian Carlo Ginzburg, the survivor and senator Liliana Segre, and his editor Ernesto Ferrero - each take up a different facet of a man who was novelist, poet, essayist, industrial chemist, amateur astronomer and mountaineer. Running through the film is the testimony of Ives Francisco, the young partisan arrested alongside Levi in the Aosta Valley in December 1943; the skis Levi left behind later carried Francisco into Switzerland and back again after the war, and give the film its title. Archive interviews return Levi's own voice on memory, work, writing and his Jewish roots.