Monday,
October 02, 2006
The ANNOTICO Report
"The Golden Door" is young director
Emanuele Crialese's third feature. His previous
film "Respiro" was a surprise hit, released
in 2002, it went on to win a string
of prestigious festival awards and international critical acclaim
.
His first film, the 1998 comedy "Once
We Were Strangers", was made in the States .
Emigration pic The
Golden Door is country's candidate
(ANSA) -
October 2, 2006
An epic tale about Italian emigration at the start
of the 20th century was chosen as
Nuovomondo (The Golden Door),
written and directed by acclaimed young director Emanuele Crialese,
will compete to be on the final five-strong shortlist to be unveiled on January
23 .
The film
focuses on a Sicilian family who make the journey from their homeland to
It recounts
the family's voyage and their eventual arrival at the Golden Door, namely the
immigrant processing centre on
The visually
stunning movie, which cost $11 million to make, couples French star Charlotte Gainsbourg with little-known Sicilian actor Vincenzo Amato .
Crialese, 41, penned the
story after several visits to the centre - now a museum - on Ellis Island,
which admitted 17 million immigrants to
By 1900, Ellis
Island was admitting up to 5,000 people a day and more than 40% of the
The immigrants
were detained for up to a day on the island, where they faced an
often-humiliating inspection process, which included physical and psychological
examinations, as well as literacy tests and questions about their political views .
The gruelling admission procedures are detailed in The Golden
Door. Crialese revealed recently that an archivist at
the museum had given him access to rare documents which he had found
"astonishing" because they revealed the sort of psychological
screening tests that at one point the immigrants were subjected to .
"The
women were shown a female body cut up into 18 pieces. Their first instinctive
reaction was 'I didn't do it'. The men instead were shown a tennis court
without a net and they had to say what was missing. Many of them o! bviously didn't even know what
tennis was," Crialese said .
"I
discovered that this was where the basics of Lombroso's eugenics came
from," said the director, referring to the famous 19th-century Italian
criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, who proposed the theory of a criminal type .
He said that
Italian and Irish immigrants, who made up the bulk of the would-be immigrants,
showed themselves to be more adaptable than others .
"They
were capable of doing any type of work. They were the only ones, apart from
blacks, who worked on the cotton plantations," he said. Crialese stressed that he was not criticising
"I merely
wanted to portray the immigrant dream, without entering into any polemics and
without passing judgement," he said .
The Golden
Door, Crialese's third feature, competed in last
month's Venice Film Festival where it picked up the Silver Lion for Revelation,
an optional jury award which is rarely gi! ven out .
Crialese's previous film Respiro was a surprise hit. Passing practically unobserved
in
Set in a
fishing village on the southern Sicilian
Benigni also bagged Oscars
for best actor and best music .
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