Low wages and long working days are the rule pity the man who challenges the standards. The labor market in the agriculture industry is controlled by the ‘Ndrangheta, the regional Mafia. The economic situation has declined in this part of southern Italy. None of these otherwise generous guys - surrogate relatives who help him and Abas settle into a mouse-infested tent city - has money to spare.
While they all walk happily together down the highway, a car swerves in a failed attempt to mow them all down. They bond with old friends and rapidly make new ones. They are led to a concrete holding compound by a starchy military officer, registered, and let loose to fend for themselves in a foreign land. Instead, he makes the trip with his dour, unenthusiastic friend Abas (Mauritanian-born ex-model Alassane Sy) - an arduous journey through the scalding deserts of Algeria and Libya, where robbery and general ripoffs are the norm, then across the treacherous Mediterranean, barely hanging on to the skeleton of their sunken boat before reaching Italy. Like most newcomers, Ayiva travels without kinfolk, to whom he is expected to assist with remittances. Today’s economic migrants do not include so many relatives. Lacking even an iota of propriety, he hasn’t a clue how condescending he is.įlaws abound when you peel away Rocco’s rationale. He hands him some Euro notes and asks him to work his young daughter Marta’s birthday celebration. “That’s how it should be,” he adds decisively. In a hushed tone, Rocco recalls his grandfather, who went to New York decades before and, when times got tough, asked for and received help from family members.
He meekly asks the chief to sponsor him for papers that would allow him to stay and work for longer than the three months he was automatically granted upon entering the country. Paternalistic though it may be, the relationship extends Ayiva a minor place in Rocco’s extended family.Īyiva tests the waters. Ayiva (Koudous Seihan, an immigrant himself and currently an advocate for migrants’ rights), the single father of a seven-year-old daughter and a recent arrival from Burkina Faso, rides in a truck driven by his boss, Rocco (Davide Schipilliti), on whose estate in the Calabrian town of Rosarno - near the toe of the geographical boot - he works the orchards, and whose trust he gains by picking and packaging the most presentable oranges quickly and efficiently.
Alassane Sy, Jonas Carpignano, Koudous Seihon, Mediterranea, Wyatt GarfieldĪ crushing scene in the intense Mediterranea, the first feature by New York City native Jonas Carpignano, exemplifies the nearly unbridgeable chasm that separates recent black African migrants from their reluctant white hosts in contemporary Italy, where the filmmaker has lived for the past five years.
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