Lamerica

Lamerica is a 1994 Italian drama film directed by Gianni Amelio. It entered the competition at the 51st Venice International Film Festival, in which Amelio won the Golden Osella for Best Director. The film was selected as the Italian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 67th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee. Plot The story of two men caught up in the startup of a scam shoe company in Albania. The main characters Gino and Spiro (later discovered to be Michele), go on an adventure of misfortune. Gino is a young man originally from Sicily who is involved in a company that is trying to “give every Albanian good shoes,” but it truly is a scam. Mr. Fiore (Gino’s boss) and Gino were unsatisfied with the officials that were originally set up to run the company. With the help of an Albanian middleman, they decided to find their own candidate who would be a “man of straw”, meaning he would do what they say. Spiro, or Michele, was the old man that the company hired to be their Albanian figurehead “chairman” of the company. We later learn that Spiro was a Sicilian named Michele and the problems ensued. This film compares and contrasts the old Italian man and the young Italian man and their seemingly varying identities as two men. The major contrast between the two is not the country in which they are from, but the time period in which they lived. Spiro is from the “old” Italy, where fascism and a hard life was all he knew, and Gino is from the “new” boom years where the emphasis is on money and materialistic items. This difference is substantially indicated throughout the film. This adventure unravels Spiro's tragic personal history and allows Gino to become intimately acquainted with the full extent of Albanian poverty. This Albanian poverty is a mirror of how Italy used to be during Spiro's time. Gino's car tires are stolen, while the fancy shoes he gave Spiro are also stolen by children. Gino and Spiro follow a group of Albanians who are headed for Italy in search for a better life, first by truck and later by ship. The Albanian exodus parallels that of Italians for the United States, which is where Spiro believes that they are heading. The Question of Italian Identity in Lamerica