The Red Tree

THE RED TREE tells the little known history of Italian gay men being arrested and exiled to a remote prison island during Mussolini’s Fascist regime.  An elderly man returns to the island of San Domino where 60 years before during the Fascist era he was imprisoned with hundreds of other men for being gay. As he walks the island alone, memories come back – of all-male dances in his home town in Sicily in the 1930s, of his beating and arrest, and the difficulties of prison life on the island – a unique place where all the prisoners were gay and the seeds of a community were first sown.

Paul Rowley