30 October 2008

Lamerica - a film by Gianni Amelio

Released in 1994 this film about a pair of business-man adventurers trying to make a swift profit in post-communist Albania explores the landscape of transition sharply contrasting the expectations of Albanian would-be-refugees and our young Italian protagonist. According to the author of this review:

'In Italy, the film flatly states, young men only die in car accidents. But L'America poses other questions that are more elusive, and more universal: Have Albanians (or, for that matter, Romanians, East Germans, or Poles) found freedom, after decades under communist rule? Or, has a new kind of tyranny, that of capitalism and greed, replaced the old?'

Read more - from Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe