New Prize For Andrea Segre’s Io Sono Li

A movie that I saw at Open Roads: New Italian Cinema in June, Io Sono Li (Shun Li and the Poet) from director Andrea Segre has won the European Parliament Lux Prize.

The Lux Prize is a prize given to a competing film by the European Parliament. It is named after the Latin word for “light”, the objective to illuminate the public debate on European integration and to facilitate the diffusion of European films in the European Union.

lo sono Li was announced the winner by European Parliament’s President Martin Schulz in the official ceremony at the Parliament’s plenary chamber in Strasbourg. The film explores the question of immigration and, in this context, the conflict between shared traditions and individual aspirations.

It’s 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.

The three competing films are Just The Wind (Csak a Szél) by Bence Fliegauf, (Hungary, Germany and France), Shun Li and the Poet (Io sono Li) by Andrea Segre (Italy and France) and Tabu by Miguel Gomes (Portugal, Germany, France and Brazil).