Once You're Born You Can No Longer Hide

Once this film was made, you could not find it -- so I won’t talk much about something you can’t see. Williams College showed it in a series on “Tracing Migration” at Images Cinema, but it has not been released stateside, either in theaters or on DVD. I had to see it, however, because it was directed by Marco Tullio Giordana, as the follow-up to one of my favorite films of recent years, The Best of Youth. This film is not in the same league at all, but I found it worth watching, despite significant flaws. The issue of illegal immigration in Italy is viewed through the lens of a 13-year-old son of a factory owner, who falls off a yacht and is rescued by a Romanian youth aboard an old tub already overloaded with a multinational crush of illegals. The son’s eyes are opened by the experience of the Italian “welcome center” where they are all taken once the coast guard picks them up. The audience is meant to lose its innocence and naivete along with the boy. While the film has a worthy documentary impulse, the effect is didactic and misdirected. (2005, Images, n.) *6*