Lamerica (1994)

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Gino (played by Enrico Lo Verso) and Fiore (Michele Placido) are Italian racketeers who come to Albania just after the fall of communism to set up a fictive firm and pocket the grants.According to Luca Caminati, the two plot threads "challenge Italy's colonial past and in so doing force the redefinition of the notion of identity. Who is Italian? And what does it mean to be Italian?" This is an interesting concept, but unfortunately not one (as an American) I could reflect on with any real understanding.But the line between Albania and Italy is an interesting one for me in another respect -- the history of Sicily. Many of the towns on the island were populated by Albanians who have since assimilated, inter-married and speak Italian. What does it mean for them to be Italian? Or Albanian?

Italian director Gianni Amelio is a true filmmaker who is absolutely committed to his art.It is this serious as well as loyal commitment to the real cause of cinema which has led him to make a unique place for himself as a filmmaker whose stories are rooted in culture and civilizations in which they take place.Whether it is Albania or China,films by director Gianni Amelio always make a lot of sense as they never neglect the local stories for reaching the global audiences.The scale on which Gianni Amelio shoots his films is grand.'Lamerica' is an enduring proof of the grandeur of his vision.In this film,he depicts the mean nature of some human beings for whom the other persons'sufferings are a source of personal aggrandizement.There is also a lot of authenticity as Lamerica is based on the real story about the collapse of Albania after the end of a very long communist rule.How an affluent culture is blindly followed by a less fortunate culture has also been vividly described in Lamerica. This is exactly an element which makes the whole story palatable to audiences' tastes.

This movie started slowly for me but got better and better as it progressed. It's the story of a couple sleazy Italian con men who were looking to strike it rich in post-Communist Albania. They were creating a fake company and needed a stooge to be their Albanian CEO. For this, they want someone who is completely forgotten, so they go to a hell-hole that had been a prison for political prisoners and pick out an addle-brained man who'd been incarcerated there for almost 50 years. The way this poor soul is treated is pretty pathetic, however the irony occurs when the younger crook is stranded in Albania and his car is vandalized. He THINKS everything will be fine since he is a foreigner. But, he too becomes a refugee like so many Albanians. At this point, the "crazy old man" shows he isn't quite as crazy as you'd thought and despite his incarceration, he has not lost his humanity--all this being revealed as the Italian jerk slowly loses everything he has. It's an amazing juxtaposition and this makes this strange movie so worth seeing.

I just finished watching this film and it brought back to me memories of my life in Albania. the film is very precise in it's description of life in our poor land after the riots and the exoduses that occurred in the early '90s. I was lucky myself not to have gone through what most people go through during this film but I can identify with some of it. even though the film focuses more on the italian businessman, the struggle for survival that most Albanians had to go and still have to is quite clear. this film should be watched by all interested in understanding why people have to abandon their homelands. this is a perfect example and should open eyes to many.