Golden Door

Sicily, the beginning of the twentieth century. Salvatore is a very poor farmer and a widower. He decides to go to America. The reason is not concrete information; it is photographs passed from hand to hand. In the photographs there are giant vegetables, rivers running with milk and money trees, and the villagers believe them. Salvatore takes his mother and two sons and sets out. On the ship he meets an Englishwoman; Lucy is travelling alone and needs a husband to be let ashore. The journey does not end at Ellis Island. There are tests there: intelligence questions, medical examinations, marriage records. Who enters and who is sent back is decided there. Emanuele Crialese writes and directs. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vincenzo Amato and Aurora Quattrocchi are in the cast. It is an Italian, French and German co-production. The film won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The matter it treats is not migration but the story that persuades people to migrate; the film shows this directly through imagined scenes. The Ellis Island section is built with documentary care; the tests and the sorting are shown in detail. The departure of the ship was shot as a single take and is the film's most cited image. Its limit is rhythm; the narrative is slow and the plot thin. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian cinema and narratives of migration. Who it is not for: the pace is low, the ending abrupt, and the imagined sections lose some viewers.