Spike Lee film attacked

Earlier this year the film director Spike Lee (pictured) earned himself endless (and priceless) column inches when he attacked Clint Eastwood's World War Two movies Flags of Our Fathers and Letter from Iwo Jima, which he claimed were inaccurate because they did not include black soldiers. Now the guns have been turned on him. Surviving members of the Italian resistance have attacked his latest offering, Miracle at St Anna, the story of the massacre of 560 civilians – including women and children – in Tuscany in August 1944 by SS troops as they retreated northwards in the face of the Allied advance.

The film, which highlights the role of African-American soldiers in the war, suggests that anti-Fascist partisans indirectly caused the atrocity by taking refuge in the village and then abandoning the residents to their fate. It even shows a partisan collaborating with the Nazis. This directly contradicts the accepted Italian version of events, which is that the slaughter was not a reprisal but an unprovoked act of brutality for which the partisans were used as a pretext.

Partisan organisations have been quick to mobilise. Today they will stage protests at the film's Italian premiere, which will take place at Viareggio, on the Tuscan coast, close to the site of the massacre.

Giovanni Cipollini, the deputy head of Anpi, the partisans' association, said the film was a "false reconstruction" and a "travesty of history". Didala Gherarducci, the secretary of Anpi, said that her husband died in the massacre and she had written to Lee to tell him that his "false" version of events "weighs on my heart like a stone".

But Lee, a bellicose type, is unrepentant. At a press conference on Tuesday, he said he was not "apologising", claiming that there was "a lot about your history you have yet to come to grips with. This film is our interpretation, and I stand behind it." He added that the film, which follows the fate of four black GIs, was intended "to restore the voice of black soldiers who fought in the war". He said that "not all Italians" had admired the partisans, many of whom fled to the mountains and left civilians to face the Nazis. "I have not invented anything."