Lamerica

Infobox Film
name = Lamerica


director = Gianni Amelio
writer = Gianni Amelio,
Andrea Porporati,
Alessandro Sermoneta
starring = Enrico Lo Verso
Michele Placido
Piro Milkani
Carmelo Di Mazzarelli
Elida Janushi
Sefer Pema
Idajet Sejdia
Marieta Ljarja
producer = Mario Cecchi Gori
distributor = New Yorker Films
released = October 4 1995 (USA)
music = Franco Piersanti
runtime = 116 min
language = Italian, Albanian
budget =
imdb_id = 0110299

"Lamerica" is an award-winning 1994 film directed by Gianni Amelio.

Plot

Gino (played by Enrico Lo Verso) and Fiore (Michele Placido) are Italian racketeers who come to Albania just after the fall of the communists to set up a fictive firm and pocket the grants.

They need a stooge and choose Spiro Tozaj/Michele Tallarico (Carmelo Di Mazzarelli), an old man in a prison, who turns out to be an Italian veteran from World War II. Easily confused and utterly impoverished, this elderly former political prisoner seems the perfect choice, until he unexpectedly disappears.

Gino is assigned to find him, setting out a journey that leads him to discover Spiro's tragic personal history and become intimately acquainted with the full extent of Albanian poverty. Gino's car is stolen, while the fancy shoes he gave Spiro are also stolen.

Gino and Spiro follow a group of Albanians who are headed for Italy in search for a better life, first by truck and later by ship. The Albanian exodus parallels that of Italians for the United States, which is where Spiro believes that they are heading.

Awards

*1994 European Film Awards - "Best Film"
*1994 Venice Film Festival - 4 Awards including "Best Director"
*1995 São Paulo International Film Festival - "Critics Award"
*1995 David di Donatello: Best Cinematography, Best Score, Best Sound
*1995 Nastro d'Argento: Best Director, Best Cinematography
*1996 Goya Awards - Best European Film

Critical and scholarly reception

In the film, Spiro Toiza rediscovers his Italian identity of Michele and at the end of the film believes the boat is headed to New York, while on the other hand Gino loses all materialistic indications that he's Italian and comes to look like another Albanian in a boat full of them. These two plot threads "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?" [Luca Caminati, "The return of history: Gianni Amelio's "Lamerica", memory, and national identity" "Italica" 83.3-4 (Fall - Winter 2006): 596]

"TV Guide" gives the film four stars, finding it "A boldly chilling portrait of post-Communist Europe in moral eclipse, directed with passion and singular grace by Italian Gianni Amelio (STOLEN CHILDREN)." [Staff, " [http://www.tvguide.com/movies/lamerica/review/130609 Lamerica: Review] " "TV Guide" Accessed Jan. 14, 2008] Janet Maslin, writing for "The New York Times", finds that "The film's synthesis of fact and fiction is gracefully achieved," and expressed hope that after the screening of "Lamerica" at the 1995 New York Film Festival, Amelio would "emerge ... much more widely known." [Janet Maslin, "Film Festival Review; Scheming Italians In Troubled Albania" "The New York Times" October 4, 1995]

References

ee also

*"Tirana Year Zero"

External links

*imdb title|id=0110299|title=Lamerica