And Agnes Chose to Die 1976

Agnese Ingrid Thulin is a middle-aged woman from Comacchio who lives with her husband Palita Massimo Girotti, a steadfast member of the Italian Resistance. One day Palita is deported to a concentration camp, where he will die; driven by grief, Agnese resolves to help her companions by carrying food, information, weapons, and news from country to country to keep their network alive.

She becomes a partisan relay, a six-month stretch in which she ferries crucial supplies and messages between increasingly perilous routes, all while staying one step ahead of German patrols. The danger deepens when a German soldier Peter Boom kills her black cat for sport, and that same night Agnese strikes back, breaking his head with the butt of a machine gun and leaving him for dead. After this act of violence, she must escape and enter the clandestine life of the Resistance, shedding her former life to become mother Agnese: she prepares meals for partisans, checks that there are enough provisions, and performs housework to remain inconspicuous under the watchful eye of the Germans.

When, in the last harsh winter, a group of partisans is betrayed and exterminated along the route designed to take them beyond the lines, Agnese disobeys her commander Stefano Satta Flores by hiding the survivors in the safety of her own house, an act born of raw courage and stubborn loyalty. The partisans face suspicion from ordinary townspeople and are underestimated even by the Allies, rendering their cause fragile and fragile-looking from the outside. After the partisan battle ends in defeat, Agnese returns to her role as a courier, moving quietly through danger until a roundup brings the officer who she believed she had killed to the fore; that officer recognizes her, and in a final, fatal confrontation, Agnese is killed by him, closing a life defined by devotion, resilience, and unyielding faith in the cause.