Film

Once You're Born (2004)

Director: Marco Tullio Giordana

Movie review

From Time Out London

Giordana’s extremely disappointing follow-up to ‘The Best of Youth’ centres on 12-year-old Sandro (Gadola), son of a well-off Brescia factory owner (Boni), who goes on a yachting trip with his dad and a friend, only to fall overboard one night… Happily for the boy (if not for us), he’s miraculously rescued by a Romanian youth (Toma) who, like his younger sister and a gaggle of other illegal immigrants, is being ferried towards Italy by two ruthless people traffickers. This is just the beginning for Sandra and his parents in terms of discovering how the dispossessed live and are treated upon their unwelcome arrival in Italy. As the movie slides deeper and deeper into melodrama, its child’s-eye perspective on poverty, suffering and desperation becomes ever more inadequate, ever more condescending. One suspects even Berlusconi might like this movie.

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