Written and directed by Emanuele Crialese
A film on general release
Why make a film about Sicilian emigrants at the turn of the last century attempting to enter the United States? Aren’t there sufficient real- life contemporary stories of immigrants from the third world, fleeing poverty and risking their lives in a bid to make a living in the West? Or so I was thinking at the outset of this film.
The opening is starkly arresting and there is immediately a feeling of suspense as the camera follows men climbing barefoot over rocky terrain, holding stones between their teeth. One is soon in the presence of an alien, superstitious culture, and of a family barely able to wrest a living from the earth to which they are tied. The naïve belief that in a foreign land there may be rivers of milk and coins raining down from the sky is conveyed in strangely surrealistic sequences.
The pace is sustained as the family, a ragamuffin crew, make their way to the great ship that will carry them over the ocean to the new world. The photography superbly conveys the claustrophobic conditions in the steerage with shots resembling fragments of old masters’ paintings. The sense of dignity preserved in such adverse circumstances warms one to the plight of the emigrants.
The final part of this intense and enigmatic film deals with the various examinations and procedures, medical and hygienic to which they are subjected on arrival, and in detention on Ellis Island. The shock and humiliation are palpable. Subtly a sense of the ancient culture (albeit non-literate) from which they originate, the vestiges of which they are still the bearers, is contrasted with the banality of the intelligence tests to which they are subjected by a world supposedly more advanced. At the end of the film one is left, not with the completion of a story, but with a strongly felt question: what are the values that prevail in the world that the immigrants are aspiring to enter-and at what personal cost will it be to do so?
