28
An Accented Gaze: Italy’s Transmigrant Filmmakers
Áine O’Healy
A survey of the subject matter of a significant number of films released in Italy in recent years brings into focus a growing concern with the transformations that have marked the social landscape as the result of globalization. From a sociocultural point of view, globalization is understood as the process through which individuals and communities experience the impact of economic and cultural forces operating at a transnational level. Since culture is so closely linked to issues of identity in its multiple dimensions, it has become a topic central to political campaigns and academic debates, as well as creative and artistic initiatives that seek to make sense of it. One of the underlying preoccupations that can be detected in the subtext of many Italian films made over the past 20 years is the need to make sense of the shifting points of reference that influence individual and community identities in a global landscape. In Italian cinema, this preoccupation is articulated in diverging ways, through a focus on a broad range of issues associated with the globalizing process.
Several recent films, for example, focus on Italian citizens across the class spectrum as they face the economic insecurities flowing from unemployment, layoffs, and financial precariousness in the wake of outsourcing and transnational mergers—in other words, from the general shift in employment practices that has occurred in the neoliberal era. These changes not only present a threat to many Italians’ sense of financial stability but also work to erode traditional class affiliations. A considerably larger category of films, however, gestures toward the transformations brought about by the remarkable increase in human mobility across borders that has occurred globally since the early 1990s. While some of the films exploring this phenomenon focus on Italians journeying beyond national borders, the majority of them deploy narratives of economic migration to Italy, highlighting the tensions that have characterized the country’s shift from emigrant nation to the destination point of over five million immigrants over the course of the past 30 years. In this thematically interconnected body of films focused on the turbulence of contemporary migrations, the interface between the national and the global is poignantly thrown into relief.
In the early 1990s, while mass immigration to Italy was in its initial, intensive, phase, films involving migrant characters represented a mere trickle in the total number of features released each year. In recent years, however, the rate of output has dramatically increased. Indicative of this trend is the fact that more than 10 of the Italian films screened at the 2011 Venice Film Festival highlighted stories of immigration (Diamanti 2011). Two of these garnered important awards: Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma won the Special Jury Prize—the first Italian film to be so honored in several years—and Guido Lombardi’s Là‐bas carried off the award for best feature by a first‐time director. Additionally, Io sono Li (Shun Li and the Poet), the first dramatic feature by the documentary filmmaker Andrea Segre, earned high praise from critics, while Ermanno Olmi’s latest release Il villaggio di cartone (The Cardboard Village), which also focuses on contemporary immigration, met with a more ambivalent response.
Clearly, the encounter between Italians and those foreign‐born residents seeking to make a new life in their midst has become one of the most insistent preoccupations of Italian filmmakers, echoing and often critiquing widely expressed anxieties about Italy’s changing demographic profile. These anxieties have been exacerbated over the years by the rhetoric of specific political platforms, most notably that of the northern populist party Lega Nord with its explicitly racist agenda, and were further intensified by the eventual criminalization of clandestine immigration and the implementation of the policy of respingimenti (the “pushing back” of seaborne migrants without papers). In contradistinction to the rhetoric of much of mainstream media reporting, which has over time helped to fan the flames of prejudice and xenophobia, Italian feature films about migration have attempted with varying degrees of success to offer a more nuanced and compassionate perspective on the phenomenon of immigration. Yet, this body of work, generally categorized as Italy’s “cinema of immigration,” has until recently been almost exclusively the product of Italian directors rather than immigrant filmmakers. Furthermore, it is concerned for the greater part with the Italian experience of immigration, that is, with the subjective experience of Italian citizens as they are challenged or transformed through the encounter with alterity. In this expansive body of films, the figure of the migrant is often a fleeting or enigmatic presence, inspiring resentment, pity, or distrust.1
Issues of authorial perspective and tonality separate the majority of feature films that reflect Italy’s recent demographic transformations from the substantial volume of literary texts produced by immigrant, exilic, or postcolonial writers in Italy over the past 20 years.2 Relatively new to the experience of mass immigration, Italy does not yet host the type of large, settled diasporic communities that have facilitated the emergence of distinctive ethnic, postcolonial, or diasporic cinemas in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Since 1997, however, a handful of transnational migrants, either working alone or in collaboration with Italian filmmakers, have succeeded in making short films, full‐length features, and documentaries that effectively give voice to the migrants’ experience of uprooting, dislocation, and outsider status. It is on this sparse, heterogeneous, and critically neglected body of work that the remainder of this chapter will focus, attempting not only to assess the formal qualities and thematic preoccupations of the films in question but also to explore the common cultural project that underpins it.
Hamid Naficy’s groundbreaking volume, An Accented Cinema (2001), offers a theoretical framework that may facilitate an assessment of the small but distinctive corpus of feature films made in Italy by filmmakers whose origins lie elsewhere. Naficy’s formulation of the category of accented cinema drew critical attention to the rapidly growing body of transcultural films that had emerged over the previous 15 years within various diasporic or migrant contexts across the globe. Such films sit uneasily within the traditional framework of national cinema and need new tools of analysis and classification. Inspired by Henry Louis Gates’s (1988) groundbreaking study The Signifying Monkey, Naficy adopted the term “accented” to describe a style of filmmaking that has arisen in response to experiences of marginalization, exile, migration, or diaspora, phenomena that result in a kind of “liminal subjectivity and a sense of interstitiality both in society and in the film industry” (10). Analyzing a large group of films from different regional, national, and cultural contexts, Naficy describes accented films as interstitial since “they are created astride and in the interstices of social formations and cinematic practices.” Consequently, they are “simultaneously local and global” (4) and “in dialogue with the [filmmakers’] home and host societies,” their national cinemas and audiences (6). For Naficy, accented cinema encompasses three distinct types of films, which are made, respectively, by exilic, diasporic, and what he calls “postcolonial ethnic and identity” filmmakers (15). The distinctions among the three subcategories are based on “the varied relationship of the films and their makers to existing or imagined homeplaces” (21). To some extent, Naficy’s paradigm is an offshoot of old‐fashioned auteur theory in the sense that, at the thematic level, accented films are underpinned by the filmmakers’ own experiences and world views (12).
The best known among the small group of immigrant directors who have made films in the Italian context is undoubtedly the Turkish‐born Ferzan Ozpetek,3 as he alone has successfully carved out a prominent profile in the national film industry. Ozpetek has by now directed nine successful feature films that have garnered a mainly positive response from Italian critics and audiences. Although his first two features Hamam: il bagno turco (Steam: The Turkish Bath, 1997) and Harem Suare (1999) are set for the most part in Turkey, and Turkish actress Serra Yilmaz is cast as a foreigner living in Italy in four of his subsequent films, his work as a whole shows merely a passing concern with issues of dislocation, uprooting, or exile. Turkey, as it emerges in Hamam: il bagno turco and Harem Suare, is a site of powerful if enigmatic allure, redolent with the promise of intense sensual pleasures. Many of the narrative and pictorial references embedded in these two films—as seen even in their titles, which evoke the traditional icons of the steam bath and the seraglio—are, in fact, linked to timeworn Orientalist fantasies, feeding into conventional Western constructs of the East as a more enticing and sexually seductive space than that of Western modernity.
Figure 28.1 Intercultural rapprochement through sharing food in Le fate ignoranti. (The Ignorant Fairies, Ferzan Ozpetek, 2000). Screen grab.
Over the past 10 years, however, Ozpetek’s output has become progressively less accented, abandoning the self‐exoticizing tendencies implicit to some degree in his earliest features. Although reviewers still refer to him in passing as “the Italo‐Turkish director,” the dominant assessment of his films at present suggests that they are perceived as part of the mainstream of Italian film production. His cinematic references are for the most part self‐consciously Italian, as visual citations of prominent filmmakers from Pietro Germi to Pier Paolo Pasolini can be detected in much of his work over the past 10 years. Furthermore, unlike the films of most of the accented filmmakers discussed in Naficy’s volume, Ozpetek’s work—with some fleeting exceptions—remains largely unconcerned with the conflicts and dilemmas that often characterize the lives of immigrants, exiles, and other diasporic subjects. What may indeed have enabled the mainstream appeal of his films is the distance they take from preoccupations of this kind.
Although Naficy distinguishes three types of accented filmmakers based on the various modalities of geographical and cultural displacement that they have experienced, only one of these categories, that of exilic filmmakers, applies to those immigrant directors who have succeeded in making at least one feature film in Italy focusing on stories of migration: Rachid Benhadj, Edmond Budina, Mohsen Melliti, and Mohamed Zineddaine. According to Naficy, exilic filmmakers tend to maintain an ambivalent relation with both homeland and adopted country, and their films share similar themes, narrative structures, and visual forms as well as distinctive patterns of production, distribution, and reception. These characteristics can indeed be detected to varying degrees in Benhadj’s L’albero dei destini sospesi (Another Country in My Eyes: The Tree of Suspended Destinies, 1997), Budina’s Lettere al vento (Letters in the Wind, 2004), Melliti’s Io, l’altro (I, the Other, 2007), and Zineddaine’s Ti ricordi di Adil? (2008), all of which highlight narratives of Mediterranean mobility. Here, as in the case of the exilic filmmakers described by Naficy, the directors take multiple roles in the production process, developing or writing the screenplay, directing, and either performing in the film or assisting with cinematography and editing. The topos of journeying or return is another major preoccupation of the narratives, which are deeply invested in issues of territoriality, rootedness, and geography (222). Finally, each of the films has at least some connection with the biography of the filmmaker, alluding to the cultural and geographical terrain best known to him, and to the tensions characteristic of those who live astride two cultures.
A brief discussion of these four feature films illustrates how they relate to both the category of accented cinema and an expanded notion of Italian cinema. Benhadj, the oldest of the filmmakers in this group, was born in Algeria in 1949 and moved to France in the 1970s, where he studied architecture and, eventually, film production. After returning to Algeria to work in film and television, he settled in Italy in the early 1990s. Since then, he has pursued a range of successful film and television projects in various parts of Europe, but only one of his one of his feature‐length films, L'albero dei destini sospesi, bears an explicit relation to economic immigration as experienced within the Italian context. The film was conceived as part of a miniseries, produced by Pier Giorgio Bellocchio for Rai2 in 1997, which was entirely devoted to the emerging theme of Italian immigration. Titled Un altro paese per i tuoi occhi (“Another Country for Your Eyes”), the four‐part series constitutes one of the few examples of an institutional commitment to the project of reforging the social imaginary in light of Italy’s changing demographic profile. Benhadj’s film, however, was the only one among the four produced for the series that was made by a director who was not born in Italy.
L’albero dei destini sospesi recounts the fragile attachment forged between Samir (Said Taghmaoui), a Moroccan youth who has recently migrated to Italy, and Maria (Giusi Cataldo), a slightly older Italian woman. As the story begins, Samir is still adapting to his job as janitor and cook in a building where he lives along with several other immigrant laborers. Whereas his fellow residents are absorbed in a common goal of earning enough money to send back home to their families and are uninterested in integrating into Italian society, Samir is still caught up in the fantasies that propelled him to leave his home country in the first place: the glamour of Western consumerism, the possibility of economic advancement, and the dream of accessing a liberated enjoyment of sexuality through encounters with Italian women.
Samir’s fascination with the possibility of assimilating into the still unfamiliar world of Western modernity is first suggested through his eagerness to learn Italian. The film’s opening scene brings to life his imaginative visualization of a language lesson he is listening to on a cassette tape while going about his housekeeping chores. Exchanging conversation on a dance floor, the fictional characters in the recorded lesson are Rossi, an Italian construction worker from Calabria who has moved to the United States, and a young American woman introduced as Belle. In Samir’s imagination, Rossi bears a passing resemblance to Samir himself, and Belle, as the viewers will subsequently discover, looks rather similar to the Italian woman with whom he will become involved. The romantic image conjured up on the film’s visual track as the young Moroccan listens to the exchange between Rossi and Belle (which moves improbably from the conversation on the dance floor to a dialogue between Rossi and a hotel receptionist with the purpose of securing a room for the pair) suggests his desire for familiarity with and integration into a modern, Western way of life. The scene also triggers a parallel between Italian emigration to the United States in the past and North African immigration to Italy in the present, as the fictional Rossi and his dance partner are attired in a manner that evokes the fashions of the mid‐twentieth century, when Italian emigration to America was still a reality and a large number of southern Italians still aspired to make the transatlantic move. The immediate result of the young Moroccan’s immersion in the fantasy of assimilation, however, is scarcely positive, as his effort to learn Italian becomes a source of derision and contempt within the small immigrant community in which he operates.
Samir, however, is soon assigned the unexpected responsibility of driving back to Morocco to deliver cash and other gifts to the families of his countrymen. Just as he is about to set out for the port of Marseilles, he meets the Italian Maria at a shopping center, where he witnesses her quarreling furiously with her boss and presumed lover. After taking a ride home in Samir’s car out of necessity, Maria suddenly decides to undertake the journey to Morocco with him, thus setting in motion a series of discoveries and power shifts that will force both of them to confront long‐held prejudices and assumptions. Much of the film unfolds through the curious, often disoriented, sensibility of Samir, until the scene shifts to Morocco, where it becomes the Italian woman’s turn to experience the disorientation of being a stranger in an unfamiliar land. The subjective experience of uncanny alienation is highlighted in both locations through a series of self‐reflexive strategies, including hand‐held camera work, a disorienting construction of space, eerie sound effects, and occasional disjunctions between the audio and visual tracks. These stylistic choices serve to deliver a sensory impact akin to what film critic Laura Marks describes as hapticity.
Marks’s influential study, The Skin of Film (2000), uses the term “haptic” to characterize the dominant feature of experimental videos and films by exilic or minority filmmakers. Like Naficy’s accented cinema, Marks’s notion of “intercultural cinema” contains an element of resistance, connected to the hybrid identity of filmmakers who occupy complicated cultural positionalities. Suggesting that films by intercultural filmmakers are often conceived as sites of “encounter between different cultural organizations of knowledge” (6–7), Marks proposes her theory of “haptic visuality” (xi) based on the hypothesis that the experience of diaspora, exile, migration, and displacement has a profound effect on the filmmakers’ entire sensory apparatus. She argues that while hegemonic Western cinema privileges vision (xiii), intercultural film and video production invokes cultural memory by means of specific audiovisual effects, suggesting the senses of touch, smell, and taste in addition to vision and sound (161–82). The activation of multiple sensory cues in these films engages viewers bodily, eliciting an immersive experience.
In L’albero dei destini sospesi, however, it is not cultural memory that is evoked through the deployment of hapticity, but rather the disorientation engendered by transnational movement. Sequences involving eerie sounds and disconcerting visual effects unfailingly signal the outsider’s experience of estrangement. Peculiar indecipherable noises emerge on the audio track for the first time when Samir follows Maria into a ruined church while seeking shelter from a heavy downpour. Noticing the image of a cross emblazoned on the crumbling apse, he is beset by a sort of panic—suggested by dizzying camera movements and incomprehensible sounds of speech or singing—that causes him to rush back out into the blinding rain. Disturbing sound effects reemerge in the course of a wedding reception in Sanremo (an event that Samir attends as Maria’s companion) when the waiters carry a full roasted pig into the banquet room and set it forth in front of the young Moroccan who, as a Muslim, is unaccustomed to seeing and smelling cooked pork at close range. His panic becomes increasingly visible as the meat is sliced, served, and devoured by the wedding guests, until he is obliged to bolt from his seat and vomit in the street outside. Throughout this short scene, the deployment of haptic effects obliges the viewer to share the young man’s visceral discomfort under the pressure of conflicting social imperatives.
Intimations of psychological distress recur on the soundtrack after the couple reaches Morocco. No longer a traveler in her own country, Maria is now a foreign woman in a strange land. As Samir leaves the familiar sights of the modern city and drives out into the desert, she is no longer able to decode with any reliability the scene that confronts her visually, obliging her to endure moments of panic and terror similar to those experienced by the young Moroccan in Italy. Here, as Maria struggles to make sense of her encounter with unfamiliar customs, people, and landscapes, the film again deploys haptic effects to invite the viewer to empathize with the Italian woman’s lack of reliable points of reference.
L’albero dei destini sospesi is clearly addressed to an Italian audience, suggesting the similarities between the bewilderment and alienation experienced by an Italian woman traveling in Morocco and the young Moroccan’s struggle to cope with unfamiliar aspects of Italian culture. It could be argued that this is a false parallelism, since Maria—her distress and discomfort notwithstanding—is a tourist, with potential recourse to privileges that can scarcely be enjoyed by migrant workers. Nonetheless, her gender reduces significantly the autonomy and authority she seems to expect as a Western traveler and forces her to experience a level of vulnerability that she has never known before.
Though the film does not pay particular attention to the problems of discrimination and material hardship routinely experienced by many immigrants in Italy, nor addresses the obstacles that generally attend the process of border crossing between the Global South and the Global North, it implicitly evokes empathy for the cultural alienation experienced by the country’s growing immigrant population. Furthermore, far from constructing a happy ending for the romance that blossoms between the Italian woman and the Moroccan youth, L’albero dei destini sospesi foregoes conventional narrative resolution, as Samir abruptly obliges Maria to return to Italy alone upon discovering that she is pregnant (presumably as the result of her relationship with her former boss), and proceeds to his native village to deliver the gifts with which he has been entrusted by his fellow countrymen in Italy. Nonetheless, he later finds a note from Maria assuring him that fate may one day enable them to meet again. With this device, the film conjures up the possibility, rather than the likelihood, of their reunion. Ultimately, it offers a sense of circularity by reintroducing in the concluding moments the visualization of Samir’s Italian lesson, first seen in the opening sequence. When Belle and Rossi appear on screen in the final scene of the film, they are shown dancing and kissing each other fondly. Meanwhile, on the audio track, the narrator’s voice introduces a lesson on the future tense of the verb, which will enable the characters to express their hopes for the future. Ending on this whimsical, upbeat tone, the scene obliquely raises the hope that Italy’s contemporary immigrants will be assimilated into the host society much as Italian emigrants were (though not with difficulty and struggle) upon their arrival in the United States many years earlier.
Though L’albero dei destini sospesi was made with a specific pedagogical mandate and is addressed to a broad Italian viewing public, it has been seen by a limited audience. Selected for screening at the Venice Film Festival, it was well received but never obtained a theatrical release. When initially screened on Rai2, it was consigned to a late‐night viewing slot (D’Arcangeli 2010, 38)—that is, at an hour when the viewers most likely to watch it are those already interested in the topic at hand. Over the years, copies have been made available by Rai for screenings in educational settings, but the film has not been distributed commercially on VHS or DVD. Thus, despite its appreciable artistic merits, L’albero dei destini sospesi has failed in the broad sense to receive recognition as a properly cinematic object.
Like Benhadj’s film, Budina’s first feature Lettere al vento reveals a clear interest in intercultural encounters and conflicts, in travel and homecoming, though it presents these in a very different way. Born in Albania in 1953, Budina worked as an actor and theatre director in Tirana before his move to Italy in the course of the great Albanian exodus of 1991. Entering Italy under more privileged circumstances than did the majority of his countrymen at the time, he was eventually obliged to accept long‐term employment in a factory in Bassano del Grappa in the absence of suitable opportunities in the field in which he had previously worked. After several years of struggling to secure production funds to shoot his own screenplay, he succeeded in doing so in 2002. An international coproduction, Lettere al vento was financed by the Donatella Palermo production company in Rome and by Era Film in Tirana. It also received some Italian state funding, with an additional contribution from the Torino Piemonte Film Commission. The film was shot for the most part in Albania, with a cast and crew composed largely of Albanians.
Lettere al vento highlights the routine corruption and commonplace tragedies that accompanied the flow of human traffic from Albania to Italy in the early 1990s. More specifically, it narrates the story of an Albanian intellectual (played by the filmmaker) who travels to Italy in the early post‐Communist period to search for his missing son, whom he suspects of having joined an organization of smugglers and traffickers. Constructed in a visual style that alternates straightforward realism with surreal and carnivalesque sequences deliberately reminiscent of the work of both Federico Fellini and Emir Kusturica, the film seems to contradict the image of Albanian migrants as vulnerable victims offered by Gianni Amelio’s well‐known film Lamerica (1994) by pointing to the emergence of a new, transnational, criminal class of profiteers, eager to exploit the desperation of the most vulnerable migrants, and suggesting the kind of tragedy wrought on those whose lives are touched by increasingly sophisticated systems of exploitation. Budina’s script explicitly brings to mind real‐life kidnappings, the enforced prostitution of adolescent Albanian girls, people‐smuggling, identity theft, and the drowning of clandestine immigrants in the Mediterranean: phenomena that have become indelibly associated with the experience of illegal border crossings. If Lettere al vento is flawed by a simplistic opposition set up between the morally upstanding protagonist, willing to sacrifice his interests for the sake of maintaining his integrity, and the unscrupulous greed of his Albanian antagonists, the pathos generated by the final sequence shot on the Albanian shore has both a haunting lyrical power and a precise historical specificity.
Unlike L’albero dei destini sospesi, Budina’s film does not appear to address itself specifically to an Italian audience. Although part of the narrative is set in Italy, the Italian treatment of Albanian migrants is not its major focus, and the Italian language is heard on few occasions. Despite the film’s occasionally didactic tone, it speaks primarily to a cosmopolitan audience of cinephiles through its self‐conscious deployment of citations from European art cinema. Though it has never received theatrical release in Italy, it has been shown on television and at film festivals, and has garnered largely positive reviews from Italian critics.4
The stylistic features of Mohsen Melliti’s Io, l’altro are more mainstream than those of either L’albero dei destini sospesi or Lettere al vento, and the film has been much more widely screened and reviewed. Melliti, who is known primarily as a creative writer, was born in Tunisia in 1967 and came to Italy as a political exile in 1989. Although he received residence permits from the Italian state, he remained officially stateless for many years, and was unable to travel anywhere outside the European Union. Melliti switched from writing to filmmaking relatively well on in his creative career, beginning with documentaries and shorts. He is credited as both screenwriter and director of Io, l’altro, his first feature film. Shot in 2006, it was briefly distributed in Italian movie theatres in 2007 and was subsequently released on DVD.
Io, l’altro revolves around two characters, a Sicilian fisherman named Giuseppe (played by the internationally popular Italian star Raoul Bova) and his long‐time fishing partner Yousef (Giovanni Martorana), a Tunisian immigrant to Italy. The fact that the men bear the Italian and Arabic versions of the same ancient Semitic name brings into relief the juxtaposition of identity and alterity reflected in the film’s title and hints at the ethnic ties linking Sicily to the Maghreb. Almost all the film’s action unfolds in the course of 24 hours on board a fishing trawler in the Strait of Sicily, a stretch of sea that has attained notoriety in recent years as the watery grave of thousands of migrants who have lost their lives while attempting to reach Italian shores.
The film raises at least three important issues relating to contemporary Italian immigration. The first is embedded in the main thrust of the plot—namely, the impact that the so‐called war on terror has had on ordinary human relationships, and specifically on the way in which many Italians were likely to construe the presence of North African and Middle Eastern migrants in their midst after the wave of paranoia that arose in response to the events of September 11, 2001. This theme is underscored in the dialogue and is explicitly foregrounded in the film’s dedication “to the victims of the war on terrorism.”
The second issue is the loss of life that often marks the journey of clandestine migrants who travel toward Italy by sea in precarious vessels, entirely at the mercy of smugglers and traffickers. The perils of these irregular crossings are referenced in a complex sequence that occurs in the second half of the film, where the body of a drowned woman emerges from the sea, having become entangled in the men’s fishing net. It becomes clear that the woman was deliberately thrown into the sea by her smugglers.
The third important issue, suggested in a more oblique way than the others, is the repressed memory of Italy’s colonial adventures in the Horn of Africa. In this respect, Yousef’s identification of the drowned woman hauled aboard the fishing trawler as Somali—that is, as hailing from a territory that was once part of Italian East Africa—is worthy of particular scrutiny. Since citizens of countries formerly colonized by Italy do not constitute a major part of the country’s contemporary immigrant population, Yousef’s immediate recognition of the woman’s nationality seems indeed surprising, if not overdetermined.
While the details of Italy’s colonial history are routinely downplayed or disavowed by Italians both at the public and the private level even today, the experience of colonial conquest and the institutional commitment to a system of racial discrimination through the enforcement of the Racial Laws5 during the Fascist era have contributed to the embedding of a racialized consciousness in Italian culture more generally. This has facilitated a “structure of feeling” that inflects contemporary Italian attitudes toward immigrants from the Global South. It is precisely this type of disposition that can explain—within the realist logic of Io, l’altro’s fictional narrative—Giuseppe’s sudden shift in attitude toward his longtime friend and fishing partner after a communication with colleagues on dry land raises the possibility that Yousef may be a wanted Islamic terrorist.
Significantly, it is not the Italian Giuseppe who identifies the drowned woman as Somali, but Yousef, citizen of the formerly French dominated Tunisia. Long coveted by Italy, Tunisia remained under French control throughout the colonial era, during which time it was inhabited by a large community of Italian settlers, who, like their French counterparts, assumed a position of superiority vis‐à‐vis the native population. Though none of this history is made explicit in the film, Yousef, unlike his Italian counterpart, is presented as an educated and thoughtful man, endowed with at least a minimal sense of historical consciousness. It is presumably the intimation of a shared colonial history that prompts him to identify the drowned woman as a “sister.”
The assurance with which the Tunisian fisherman declares the provenance of the drowned migrant heightens the element of the uncanny that marks the sequence as a whole. Though the woman has been fished from the sea and presumably dead for some time, her body is remarkably untouched by trauma or decomposition, and her serene features suggest that she is not dead but merely sleeping. The inexplicable perfection of her appearance may perhaps be read as a sign of her status as a ghostly irruption from another time and place. Jacques Derrida (2006, 36) has used the term “revenant” to suggest the spectrality of this kind of visitation, which constitutes the uninvited prompting of suppressed historical memory.6 The Somali woman in Io, l’altro is not exactly a reminder of the colonial past, since that history has been largely suppressed. Rather, her presence suggests the impossibility of keeping the past safely buried, of preventing it from haunting the present, in disquieting, unpredictable, and irresolvable ways.
Io, l’altro is addressed to Italian viewers, or rather, to a Western audience broadly conceived. Though marred by a tendency toward didacticism, it has attracted considerable attention both in Italy and elsewhere. Its success is certainly due at least in part to the popularity of Bova who, as the film’s coproducer and leading actor, has devoted much effort to its promotion and to underscoring its pacific message. But the particular drama at the heart of Io, l’altro—however awkwardly and schematically it is constructed—may hold some appeal for those Italian viewers who have been alienated by the rhetoric of a purported “clash of civilizations,” by the vulgar racism of Lega Nord, and by the editorial success of Oriana Fallaci’s (2002, 2006) fiercely Islamophobic, rabidly anti‐immigration, pamphlets, The Rage and the Pride and The Force of Reason, published by Rizzoli in the wake of 9/11.
Less explicitly Italian in its address is Zineddaine’s dramatic feature Ti ricordi di Adil? Born in Morocco in 1957, Zineddaine moved to Italy in 1984 to study film production at the University of Bologna. Since then he has made his permanent home in Italy, building a solid reputation in theater, photography, and documentary filmmaking. Although he has made numerous documentaries in Italy, the opportunity of making a feature film eluded him until he sought production funds in his native country.
His first feature was the low‐budget art film Réveil (2004), financed mainly with Moroccan support. Shot in black‐and‐white, it provides a melancholy meditation on the travels of a fictional Moroccan writer of humble origins who makes his way through France, Italy, and Morocco toward his impoverished hometown of Oeud Zem. This homeward journey, which brings the protagonist through strikingly different locations, is accompanied by a voiceover commentary offering an oblique critique of both contemporary Morocco and the Western way of life.
More commercially ambitious than Réveil, Zineddaine’s second feature Ti ricordi di Adil? is also primarily a Moroccan production (it has toured the festival circuit as such), though it received vital support in the final phase of production and postproduction from the Bologna Film Commission and the Cineteca di Bologna. Mariagiulia Grassilli (2008, 1250) points out that the production funds secured by the filmmaker in Morocco were crucial to creating the conditions for further support in Italy. Asserting that it was Zineddaine’s strategy of reclaiming his origins by presenting himself as “a filmmaker from the [Global] South” that ultimately enabled him to receive Italian financing, she explains that, in the dynamics of contemporary production practices, “identities are played to suit the requirements of film foundations in the North.” Ironically, while these foundations are “enthusiastic to support films from the South,” they often fail to realize that many of the “Global South” filmmakers seeking film funding today have been living in the Global North for years.
After a long (30‐minute) expository sequence in Morocco, Ti ricordi di Adil? unfolds for the most part in Italian locations. Reversing the geographical trajectory of the protagonist of Réveil, the narrative traces the path of the young Moroccan Adil (Omar Lotfi) from the heart of Casablanca to the streets of Bologna, where he meets his tragic end at the behest of a local criminal network. Shot in Moroccan Arabic with minimal dialogue in Italian, the film borrows conventions from several genres, including the coming‐of‐age film, the male melodrama, and the crime film. Yet, the self‐reflexive nuances and puzzling ellipses that mark the narrative throughout suggest that it is conceived primarily as an art film.
Reviews and publicity material accompanying festival screenings have highlighted the director’s interest in themes of migration, the difficulties of assimilation, and the sharp cultural contrast between the Moroccan and Italian settings. Close attention to the film, however, reveals that these issues, though present, are scarcely dominant. The filmmaker seems more interested in exploring the various settings in which the action unfolds and the diverse types that populate these locations than in providing a coherent rationale for his characters’ motivations. In fact, the film has a calculated ethnographic allure, with several scenes providing colorful vignettes of contemporary social life in Casablanca—in the modern, sophisticated areas along the seafront as well as the crowded, rundown neighborhoods of the old city, where the covert machinations of a small group of Islamic fanatics eventually wreak havoc on the close‐knit family of Adil’s childhood friend Rachid.
The scenes set in the wintry heart of Bologna also have an ethnographic aspect, sometimes with haunting effects, as in the spellbinding scene reminiscent of Bernardo Bertolucci’s L’ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1972), in which a couple of dancers perform a tango in a public space, to the involuntary enchantment of a tight‐lipped Muslim cleric. As the location shifts from the medieval architecture of the historical center to the more modern contours of the Villa Aldini on the outskirts (a location familiar to cinephiles as the setting for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma [Salò or the 120 days of Sodom, 1975]), the city’s population is shown to include not only the disgruntled imam but also a fanatical Italian convert to Islam and a complex crime network in which Italian and Russian gangsters seem to work in cahoots with Islamic extremists.
Zineddaine’s Adil does not resemble the migrant characters in most Italian films about migration, since his move to Italy appears to be motivated more by a restless desire for adventure than by economic need. After several attempts to cross the Mediterranean as a stowaway, he finally manages to make his way to the home of Fouazi, his wealthy and recently disabled older brother, who has apparently lived in Bologna for years. Adil’s reason for joining the world of underground crime upon his arrival in Italy is unclear, though the film suggests that the corrupt Italian lawyer who heads a local crime ring has offered to procure him a residence visa in exchange for transporting drugs. Eventually rejecting the demands of his criminal colleagues and shunning the fundamentalism of his Muslim acquaintances, he decides to head back to Morocco, only to be killed in a bomb attack as he drives out of town. What the film ultimately suggests is not so much the contrast between Casablanca and Bologna, but their ultimate interconnectedness in the global era. Though it avoids detailed exposition and fails to provide resolution for many questions raised by the plot, Ti ricordi di Adil? critiques the perils of both religious fanaticism and illegal trade, while also gesturing toward issues of bigotry, prejudice, propaganda, and greed.
With their focus on immigrant characters, liminal spaces, and tropes of restlessness and mobility, separation and journeying, the four films discussed above resonate with Naficy’s notion of exilic accented cinema. Yet, they have very different production and distribution histories, and are calculated to speak to divergent audiences. When viewed today, L’albero dei destini sospesi, originally conceived for pedagogical purposes, has the innocent, upbeat atmosphere of a film made before the disruptions of 9/11 and before the surge in loss of life that marked the massive Mediterranean migrations of the subsequent decade. It is unlikely, however, that it will be shown again to the broader public. Io, l’altro, though marred by touches of didacticism and incorporating a far less hopeful ending, has been released on DVD and promises to have the durability of a mainstream Italian film on the national circuit. This durability is not only because of Bova’s star presence (although this is a major factor) but also because the film makes no linguistic demands on the audience, as the dialogue unfolds exclusively in Italian and there is no need for subtitles. Ti ricordi di Adil? and Lettere al vento, by contrast, contain relatively little Italian dialogue and are not specifically addressed to Italian audiences. When screened on the festival circuit these two films have been described, respectively, as Moroccan and Albanian, rather than Italian, and the same process of identification tends to prevail even when they are screened in Italy.
The difficulty of accessing production funding in Italy for feature films by immigrant directors is scarcely surprising when we take into account the absence of the type of institutional support for minority filmmaking that exists in other European countries, where cultural diversity is officially valorized (Grassilli 2008, 1250). The situation is somewhat different in the case of documentary filmmaking, where the financial stakes are lower, and where regional entities or private foundations have recently shown a willingness to back projects foregrounding issues of immigration or cultural diversity. Productions of this kind include the documentaries that grew out of a video training program sponsored by Asinitas Onlus, a nonprofit organization that directs a language school for African immigrants in Rome, in collaboration with the ZaLab group, a collective of activist filmmakers. Particularly worthy of note are the films directed by the Ethiopian refugee, Dagmawi Yimer, in conjunction with Andrea Segre and other Italian colleagues. Yimer’s first codirected project, Come un uomo sulla terra (2009) has been screened on television and at several venues in Italy and overseas. Through a series of interviews that Yimer conducts with survivors now living in Rome, the film explores the brutality experienced by migrants from the Horn of Africa while crossing Libya. Also including brief footage shot in the Sahara, a newsreel clip of Berlusconi’s fawning embrace of Muammar Gaddafi, and two additional interviews by Yimer—one with an Italian politician and the other with the executive director of Frontex, the European Security Organization—Come un uomo sulla terra offers a powerful denunciation of Italian and European complicity in the tragic circumstances experienced not only by the migrants who appear on screen but also by countless others imprisoned or killed in the course of their journey toward Europe. Yimer’s most recent project, Soltanto il mare (2011), reveals a marked stylistic evolution as it stages the filmmaker’s return to Lampedusa, the island on which he first set foot in Italy, and on which he now turns his inquiring gaze.
It has been through access to funding for documentary projects that two women immigrants to Italy (of the first and second generation) have been able to find a voice in Italian filmmaking, thus offering a unique, gendered perspective on the experiences of living between two cultures. The first of these films, Io, la mia famiglia rom e Woody Allen (2009), is an autobiographical video essay directed by Laura Halilovic, 19 years old at the time, a Turinese woman of Romany origin whose parents moved to Italy from Bosnia Herzegovina several years before she was born. She completed the film in collaboration with Italian scriptwriters Davide Tosco and Nicola Rondolino with the support of the Open Society Institute and Rai3, and it has been aired on Italian television, screened in several Italian cities, and has circulated at festivals. Less widely seen is Fatma Bucka’s video diary Almost Married (2010). Bucka, born in Turkey to Kurdish parents, is a relatively recent immigrant to Italy. Made in collaboration with Sergio Fergnachino, her film documents her return to her native village in eastern Turkey in order to announce to her father her intention to diverge from the long‐sanctioned community practice of arranged marriage.
In the second decade of the twenty‐first century, several younger accented filmmakers are staking out new territory in the Italian film industry, either by abandoning their accents (at least provisionally) or by embracing popular genres in an effort to reach as wide an audience as possible. An example of the former strategy is the case of Tunisian‐born filmmaker (and actor) Hedy Krissane, who, after releasing a number of stylistically accomplished shorts inspired by themes relating to migration and displacement, made his commercial debut with Aspromonte (2012), a critically acclaimed dramatic film set in the mountains of Calabria, featuring exclusively Italian characters and situations. Although very different from Aspromonte, two recent films, Laura Halilovic’s La rom romantica (2014)7 and Fariborz Kamkari’s Pitza e datteri (2015), which focus for the most part on accented characters and themes, similarly address themselves to mainstream Italian audiences while drawing on the well‐known conventions of Italian comedy, indisputably the nation’s most popular genre. At the same time, both films—although more noticeably in the case of Pitza e datteri—derive much of their overall comedic impact from the self‐exoticizing, willfully “colorful” gaze cast by the directors on their respective ethnic constituencies—an extended Romani family in the first instance, and Italy’s Muslim community in the second. One is thus prompted to ask at what expense accented cinema finally becomes mainstream.
Figure 28.2 Crisis outside a newly adapted mosque in Pitza e datteri (Fariborz Kamkari, 2015). Screen grab.
Since the films discussed in this chapter are, to different degrees, accented, transnational, and transcultural, in what ways are they also Italian? Put another way, can these films be included in the disputed category of “Italian Cinema”? The simple answer is perhaps yes, since Italian landscapes and the Italian language (or dialects) are featured, at least to some extent, in all of them, and the assertion of an Italian “difference” comes into play when the migrant characters or migrant filmmakers come into contact with their native counterparts. But we must move beyond the question of language and landscape when discussing the fraught issue of national cinema. Film scholar Chris Berry (2006, 149) has offered a more productive way to proceed by recognizing the need to place both the national‐cinema approach and transnational cinema within a larger framework of issues around cinema and the national. According to Berry, within this framework, “the national is no longer confined to the form of the territorial nation‐state,” but includes “multiple, proliferating, contested, and overlapping” projects with various cinematic approaches and solutions. Italian cinema has for a long time been traversed by international resonances and influences, but at this point it is also necessary to recognize the impact of transnational elements originating within Italy itself: that is, through the contribution of Italy’s foreign‐born directors to the nation’s evolving cinematic imaginary.
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