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THE ITALIAN DREAM

IL SOGNO ITALIANO

DELTA STAR PICTURES - as PROD

True Story - Development 2022

- Year of production
- 2022
- Genres
- True Story, Drama
- Countries
- ITALY, ALBANIA, FRANCE
- Synopsis
- “It is a bitter laugh, and yet it is a laugh, for this event reveals the most absurd and at the same time the most ‘normal’ side of the world we live in, and of our recent and contemporary history, between bureaucrats, politicians, and confused, messed up victims, as it compares the mirroring wickedness of Communism and Capitalism,” this is what the prominent critic G. Fofi wrote after he read “Il Sogno Italiano” (“The Italian Dream”).
  The work is based on the true story of an unprecedented event regarding the six members of the Popa family, who couldn’t leave the building of an Embassy for as long as five years, stuck in prolonged international negotiations, and forced to live inside two underground rooms. During those years, after never-ending international talks, mediations, and summits of all kinds, a number of incidents and misunderstandings happen between the diplomats and the Italian police in Tirana on one side, and the officers of the Albanian secret services on the other. The work shows the absurdities existing within the two societies, as well as the circumstances of that historical moment; two worlds full of clichés, groomed in a refined yet superficial fashion, with a façade of concern and decorum: for the solitude and melancholy of individuals are a matter of interest only when they are represented on paper, or on a PC screen, or as voices on TV or at the radio. In the case of the Popa family the problem in Italy begins as soon as the frontiers of immigration meet (and clash with) the ones of reality. More than a description of a psychic development, it is a visual depiction of fear, swinging between memories and the loss of memory, with efforts made to preserve one’s dignity, and the internal struggle within one’s consciousness and the subconscious, in a timeframe frozen within the walls of the Italian Embassy and the so called ‘Western Paradise.’