IT314 ITALIAN CINEMA: INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVES
Term 1, week 10: Alternative Perspectives (iii)
Io, l’altro (Mohsen Melliti, 2007)
Key points:
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self and other; brotherhood, friendship, partnership;
intercultural relationships;
individual identity and social or political constructions of identity;
local and global; the media;
migration; multicultural Italy; postcolonial Italy;
isolation; in-between-ness;
masculinity;
violence;
dramatic and visual intensity.
‘Io, l’altro is interesting in that it is almost completely shot on a boat in Tunisian
extraterritorial waters. The boat becomes a metaphor for larger personal and
political dynamics taking place around questions of media, migration and
terrorism. The setting, a boat on the sea, is remarkable not only because it
constitutes one of those non-places described by Augé, a means of transport
disconnected from national or societal identification, but also because it is an
uncanny location where the ground rules of legality, hospitality and survival
operate differently from on the mainland’
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Sandra Ponzanesi, ‘The Non-Places of Migrant Cinema in Europe’, Third Text
[see below], p. 686.
‘The uncanny presence of the woman’s body in Melliti’s film signals a return of
the repressed memory of Italian colonialism, and at the same time obliquely
draws attention to the relative absence of this figure elsewhere in the
contemporary cinematic imaginary’
- Áine O’Healy, ‘“[Non] è una Somala”: Deconstructing African Femininity in
Italian Film’, The Italianist [see below], p. 177.
Jennifer Burns
H4.11
j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk
Select bibliography:
Cincinelli, Sonia, I migranti nel cinema italiano (Rome: Kappa, 2009).
O’Healy, Áine, ‘“[Non] è una Somala”: Deconstructing African Femininity in Italian Film’,
The Italianist, 29 (2009), 175-198.
Pastorino, Gloria, ‘Death by Water? Constructing the “Other” in Melliti’s Io, l’altro’, in
From Terrone to Extracomunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary
Italian Cinema. Shifting Demographics and Changing Images in a Multi-Cultural
Globalized Society, ed. by Grace Russo Bullaro (Leicester: Troubador; 2010), pp. 308-40.
Pell, Gregory, ‘Terroni di mezzo: Dangerous Physiognomies’, in From Terrone to
Extracomunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema.
Shifting Demographics and Changing Images in a Multi-Cultural Globalized Society, ed.
by Grace Russo Bullaro (Leicester: Troubador; 2010), pp. 178-218.
Ponzanesi, Sandra, ‘Europe Adrift: Rethinking Borders, Bodies, and Citizenship from the
Mediterranean’, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 11:2 (2011), 67-76.
------------------------, ‘The Non-Places of Migrant Cinema in Europe’, Third Text, 26:6
(2012), 675-90.
Film credits:
Directed by
Produced by
Mohsen Melliti
Aldo Arcangoli
Raoul Bova
Alberto Leotti
Maurizio Santarelli
Lorenzo Von Lorch
Written by
Mohsen Melliti, with
David Colantoni
Saverio Di Biagio
Alessandro Sigalot
Starring
Raoul Bova
Giovanni Martorana
Mario Pupella
Samia Zibidi
Lina Besrat Assefa
Mohamed Alì
Music
Louis Siciliano
Cinematography Maurizio Calvesi
Country
Italy
From Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)
Jennifer Burns
H4.11
j.e.burns@warwick.ac.uk