TORONTO – This year’s European Film Market kicked off yesterday and runs for nine days alongside the 75th Annual Berlin Film Festival. The event is the first major film market of the year bringing together industry professionals from filmmakers to financiers, and serves as a trusted barometer for industry trends in the coming year. One of the projects being pitched during the Berlinale will star Top Gun star Miles Teller as Gino Bartali – Legendary Italian Cyclist. 

A Florence native and born in 1914, Gino Bartali was a three-time Giro d’Italia Champion (1936, 1937 and 1946) and two-time Tour de France winner (1938 and 1948). His brawny build and effortless riding earned him the nickname “The Giant of the Mountains”. He was the master of climbs, winning three consecutive mountain stages at the Tour de France – a feat that took 50 years to overturn. He’d famously stay seated during the incline, while others stood on their pedals.

Bartali’s professional feats are enough to slot him into the sport’s upper echelon, but his acts of humanity and bravery during the second World War were even more remarkable. Conscripted to the war in 1939, the cyclist’s sparkling career was interrupted. He was called to active duty and stationed as an army messenger. When Mussolini was eventually overthrown in 1943, German forces invaded northern Italy, placing the lives of Italian Jews under immediate threat.

Bartali sprang into action through an underground group called the Assisi Network, at the request of the Archbishop of Florence, Elia Dalla Costa. Meeting secretly with the Archbishop, Bartali was asked to transport – on his bike – falsified identity cards to Jewish fugitives who needed them to escape persecution. Bartali who by this time had returned from official service, would ride across the country under the guise of “training”, to convents where the Jews were hiding.

The falsified documents were hidden away inside his handle bars and bicycle frame, in circumventing Nazi inspection. In fact, whenever stopped, Bartali insisted that the Nazis not touch the bike as it was specifically calibrated to his training regimen. Wearing his racing jersey, he rode thousands of kilometers daily from Florence to Genoa, and is credited for saving the lives of at least 500 people.

Even more astounding was the fact that Bartoli didn’t go public with his heroics. Ater his death in 2000, his son Andrea explained: “When I asked my father why I couldn’t tell anyone, he said, ‘You must do good, but you must not talk about it. If you talk about it, you’re taking advantage of others’ misfortunes for your own gain'”.

Oscar-winning Free Solo and Nyad filmmakers E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are directing the film. “The moment we read Karen Tenkhoff’s script, we knew this was a film we had to make. It captures everything we love about storytelling – it’s about bravery, about perseverance and, ultimately, about what it means to have moral courage,” said Vasarhelyi and Chin.

In the pics above:  Italian Gino Bartali rides uphill on his way to winning the 15th stage of the Tour de France between Aix-les-Bains and Lausanne (Switzerland) on July 18, 1948 (photo credit STAFF/AFP via Getty Images); a photo-prortrait of Gino Bartali      

Massimo Volpe is a filmmaker and freelance writer from Toronto: he writes reviews of Italian films/content on Netflix