Germany 2020 | 66 and 82 minutes | Co-production with Blaubart Film
DIRECTED BY
Ulrich Waller, Eduard Erne und Dania Hohmann
CAST
Adriana Altaras, Daniela Morozzi, Stefano Santomauro, Sergio Pierattini, Peter Franke, Gianni Ferreri, George Meyer-Goll, Anneke Schwabe, Jörg Kleemann and many others
FUNDING
Festivals
Filmfest Hamburg
SYNOPSIS
“No entry for dogs and Italians”
“You are spaghetti-eaters, traitors”
“Don’t trust any Italian, they have a loose knife in their pocket”
…Prejudices like these were a part of everyday life in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, as more and more Italian “guest workers” found their way to Germany. They were urgently needed as laborers, but at the same time, people were unfamiliar with these mostly young men from Central and Southern Italy, who for their part had problems finding their feet in the cold North, speaking the foreign language, and navigating the conflict of cultures. At the center of the film are two daughters of one of these first-generation guest workers, who set off with his ashes to the house where he was born in order to reconstruct his life there. The film “Amara Terra Mia/My Bitter Land” aims to tell the story of this migration movement. Based on a German-Italian theater production produced by the St. Pauli-Theater Hamburg with the Teatro Vittorio Alfieri in Castelnuovo Beradenga and developed and directed by Ulrich Waller, Dania Hohmann, and Matteo Marsan for the Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, this project aims to process the topic on film and thus reach a larger audience.
