Miracle at St. Anna is an upcoming 2008 war film directed by Spike Lee and written by James McBride, based on McBride's novel of the same name. The film is set to be released September 26, 2008. The film is set during World War II, in fall of 1944 in Tuscany and in contemporary New York City and Rome.

Plot

Miracle at St. Anna follows four black soldiers of the all-black 92nd Infantry Division who get trapped near a small Tuscan village on the Gothic Line during the Italian Campaign of World War II after one of them risks his life to save an Italian boy.

The story is inspired by the August 1944 Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre perpetrated by the Waffen-SS in retaliation to Italian partisan activity. There is also a reference to a sculpted head from Ponte Santa Trinita in Florence that acts as a plot device.

Production

Miracle at St. Anna is based on a novel by James McBride and is scripted by the author. Principal photography started in Tuscany on October 15, 2007. The exterior scenes were filmed close to Barga on the Serchio river, and in the villages of Colognora and Sant'Anna di Stazzema. The production was then moved to Cinecittà and Piazza del Popolo in Rome. Scenes were also shot in New York City and Nassau, Bahamas. Principal photography wrapped in January 2008 and the first trailer of the movie was released in June 2008. The budget of the film was $45 million. When Lee came to Europe in the early summer of 2007 to scout locations, he had little money with which to make the film, and he stitched together a series of distribution deals for different territories before The Walt Disney Company picked up the U.S. rights.

Following the success of his 2006 crime-drama Inside Man, director Spike Lee originally intended his next movie to be a James Brown biopic or a film about the Los Angeles riots of 1992, but he found difficulty in bringing both projects to light. So Lee, who had two uncles who served in World War II, instead chose to film Miracle at St. Anna, his first foray into the war film genre, of which he said, "there's really been a bad job of documenting the contribution African-Americans made to this country."[3] Although war films have tended to perform poorly at the box office during the time of the Iraq War, Lee said he believes the political climate will help the movie, commenting, "With an African-American running for president, anything is possible. There's a whole new dynamic in the air."

Wesley Snipes was originally slated to play one of the four leads, but had to leave the film due to his highly-publicized tax problems, and his role eventually went to Derek Luke. The actors had to endure difficult filming conditions, including about 12 hours of filming a scene in the Serchio River in Tuscany, but Michael Ealy said the most difficult scene for him was one in which the protagonists are subjected to racist abuse at a cafe in the American South. Regarding the scene, Ealy said, "My grandfather was in the Army at that same time. The fact that this is what he had to go through, it just hit me in a profound way."