Once You're Born You Can No Longer Hide

Sandro, the twelve-year-old son of a middle-class family in northern Italy, goes overboard at night during a sailing trip with his father. He is picked up by a boat full of undocumented migrants. The boy lives on that boat for several days, seeing where the people came from, what they eat, what they paid to be there. By the time he is back on land and home, a distance has opened between him and the world his father describes. Marco Tullio Giordana, adapting Maria Pace Ottieri's novel, tells migration not as a statistic or a threat but through a child's eyes. The telling does not build a one-sided accusation; the family's good intentions are shown, and so is the exact point where those intentions stop. Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli are on the screenplay too. The film screened in competition at Cannes in 2005.