Lamerica

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title Lamerica
Original title Lamerica
Country of production Italy
original language Italian ,
Albanian
Publishing year 1994
length 116 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Gianni Amelio
script Gianni Amelio ,
Andrea Porporati ,
Alessandro Sermoneta
production Mario Cecchi Gori
music Franco Piersanti
camera Luca Bigazzi
cut Simona Paggi
occupation

Lamerica is a feature film and award-winning social drama from 1994 directed by Gianni Amelio . The inspiration for the film was the events of 1991, when tens of thousands of Albaniansfledover the Adriatic to Italyon overcrowded ships like the Vlora .

Table of contents

Albania 1991 - chaos reigns in the once isolated country after the collapse of the socialist regime. The savvy, Italian Fiore ( Michele Placido - “Alone against the Mafia”) and the arrgoante, unsympathetic 28-year-old Yuppie Gino ( Enrico Lo Verso ) are elegant Italian “entrepreneurs” who come to Albania to set up a shoe factory for little money to buy. They pretend that they want to rebuild it and then put the subsidies in their own pockets. But for this purchase they need a local straw man who should be as inexperienced to simple-minded as possible - a resistance fighter against communism would be perfect. They rummage through run-down former labor camps and meet people who can be seen to have been subjected to atrocities. But this bounces off the two. Eventually, Fiore and Gino find a troubled old man: Spiro Tozaj (aka Michele Tallarico) ( Carmelo Di Mazzarelli ) - a political prisoner and Italian veteran of World War II . He is easily confused and utterly impoverished, making it seem like a perfect choice until he unexpectedly disappears just before the deal is signed.

Now Gino has to find the 80-year-old “president” of her front company in the Albanian mountains, where he is confronted with the difficult conditions that the people of Albania have to cope with and the great poverty. Different rules apply here.

Eventually, Gino's jeep is totally robbed. Including the car tires and the fancy shoes he gave Spiro. Everything is gone - just not his arrogant “I'm Italian” attitude. But since Ginos passport is gone too, he has to pretend to be an Albanian in order to come to Italy as a refugee. Thereupon the young snob Gino and the old Spiro join a group of Albanian poverty refugees who set off for Italy in search of a better life - initially on a truck. Far from his Italian roots, Gino is beginning to change. Together with Spiro, Gino and the other emigrants board a ship that the refugees call “Lamerica” and that is supposed to take them to Italy.

On his trip, Gino also gets to know the tragic, personal fate of Spiro, who is actually Italian: he deserted as a young guy like many others and then went into hiding as an Albanian. He thinks he is still in his youth and wants to go back to Sicily - to his fiancée.

The Albanian exodus corresponds to the waves of Italian emigration to the USA , so Spiro believes that this is the real destination of their trip. The title of the film “Lamerica” refers to the hope in the promised land: what Italy is to the Albanians, America was once to the Italians.

Prices

Reviews

This drama is a very moving and impressive inventory. With great skepticism, the film shows a gloomy vision of the loss of dignity and identity - for individuals as well as for a whole people. “A calm, intense, poetic, but realistic road movie that gets under your skin” (Cinema).

In the film, Spiro Toiza rediscovers his Italian identity as Michele and at the end of the film he believes that the ship is on its way to New York, while on the other hand Gino has lost all evidence of his Italian identity and on the boat full of Albanians himself like one of them looks like. These two storylines “challenge Italy's colonial past and thereby force a redefinition of the concept of identity. Who's Italian ? And what does it mean to be Italian? " ( " Challenge Italy's colonial past and in so doing force the redefinition of the notion of identity. Who is Italian? And what does it mean to be Italian? " )

TV Guide gives the film four stars and believes that it is a daring, sobering portrait of post-communist Europe in moral darkness - directed with passion and extraordinary grace by Italian director Gianni Amelio ( Stolen Children ). ( "A boldly chilling portrait of post-Communist Europe in moral eclipse, directed with passion and singular grace by Italian Gianni Amelio (STOLEN CHILDREN)." )

Janet Maslin writes in The New York Times , " The film's synthesis of fact and fiction is gracefully achieved" and expresses her hope that after the screening of Lamerica at New York Film Festival (1995) Amelio would become much better known ( “emerge… much more widely known” ).

literature

Books

  • Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The Cinema of Italy . Wallflower Press, London 2004, ISBN 1-903364-99-X , pp. 245 ff .

Article about Lamerica

  • Deborah Young in: Variety (New York), September 12, 1994
  • Louis Menashe in: Cineaste (New York), Vol. 21, No. 4, 1995
  • Janet Maslin: Film Festival Review; Scheming Italians In Troubled Albania , in: The New York Times, October 4, 1995
  • Jay Carr in: Boston Globe, December 20, 1995
  • Michael Wilmington in: Chicago Tribune, December 24, 1995
  • Gary Crowdus, Richard Porton: Beyond Neorealism: Preserving a Cinema of Social Conscience, in: Cineaste (New York), Vol. 21, No. 4, 1995
  • Michael J. Agovino: His Mind Fixed on the Moment, Eyes on the Past , in: The New York Times, December 17, 1995
  • Caryn James: The Little Things Mean a Lot ^ , in: The New York Times, December 17, 1995
  • Daniel Winkler: Gianni Amelio, 'Lamerica / Lamerica' (1994) , in: Andrea Grewe, Giovanni di Stefano (Ed.): Italian films of the 20th century in individual presentations. Erich Schmidt, Berlin 2015, pp. 391–407.
  • Daniel Winkler: Questioni meridionali, questioni europee? Ethnic and cultural alterity in contemporary Italian cinema. With an excursus on Gianni Amelio's 'Lamerica' , in: Quo vadis Romania? Journal for current Romance studies . No. 33 (2009), pp. 39-52.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Lamerica at www.cinema.de
  2. ↑ Ruth Ben-Ghiat: The Cinema of Italy . Wallflower Press, London 2004, ISBN 1-903364-99-X , pp. 245 ff .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h Lamerica at www.film.at
  4. ↑ a b Lamerica on www.moviepilot.de
  5. ↑ a b c Lamerica table of contents on www.amazon.de
  6. ↑ a b Lamerica on www.imdb.com (English)
  7. ↑ a b c Lamerica at www.filmzentrale.com
  8. ↑ Luca Caminati: "The return of history: Gianni Amelio's Lamerica , memory, and national identity", Italica , 83.3-4 (autumn – winter 2006), p. 596
  9. ↑ TV Guide editors: " Lamerica: Review ", TV Guide , accessed on January 14, 2008
  10. ↑ Janet Maslin, “Film Festival Review; Scheming Italians In Troubled Albania, ” The New York Times , October 4, 1995