Three screenings and three directors’ Q&A yesterday. I spent most of the day at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater where I watched Io Sono Li (or as they’ve translated it, “Shun Li and the Poet”) and Il Mio Domani (My Tomorrow), and Scialla! (Easy!) with the directors, Andrea Segre, Marina Spada, and Francesco Bruni.
I liked all of the movies better after hearing the directors talk about them. First, Shun Li and the Poet, told the story of a Chinese immigrant that comes to Italy as a sort of indentured servant and is working off her passage to Italy in a bar in Chioggia. Zhao Tao,won best actress at the Italian academy awards for this role, playing the lonely immigrant who makes friends with a local fisherman. and direct talked about making the film. Previously a documentary filmmaker, director Andrea Segre, said that he was interested in making a movie about the relationships between immigrants and locals in Italy, and that for the fishermen who used the bar as their “living room”, the woman who served them their coffee became a surrogate wife. The Chinese businessmen who had sent her there wanted her to do her job and keep to herself, creating one of the clashes of culture in the movie.
Originally from Chioggia, Segre said that most of the Chinese in the film were non-professional actors that he found around Chioggia or in Rome, where he lives now. It’s amazing how Italian directors have such a talent for finding ordinary, local people to fill important roles. He talked about how Italy is changing, and that when he was a child in school all of his classmates were Italians but that his children go to school with kids from all over the world.
When one of the audience members asked Segre to speak to the racism that she saw in the plot, he had an interesting answer: “You can’t really compare New York City to Chioggia”.
Do we really want to?
I Love Italian Everything 