Cynicism and Hope in Post-War Film

I find it interesting that Alex and I have each noted that our films carry a deeply cynical and gritty tone toward the war while Justine's has a more hopeful view. This suggests with respect to Italy that the country escaped the crippling feelings of national guilt that other Axis powers had to confront in the wake of WWII. Italy never carried out anything like Hitler's Final Solution, so perhaps it escaped the moral condemnation and humiliation that Germany received and was thus able to recover psychologically more quickly. Das Boot, on the other hand, seems to cast the submarine crew as appendages of the German war machine and focuses on the ordeal they endured as pawns of the Third Reich. My film takes a cynical view not because of defeat, but because of the readily apparent hollowness of the Allied victory--WWII had not ended but seamlessly shifted east to the borders of the USSR.