Multiculturalism in New Italian Cinema

Abstract

Many factors contributed in the last 30 years to bring to the fore the need for a new representation of the Italian nation in the media. They span from the local economic boom to the combination of global political events—the widespread process of de/counter-colonization, the demise of communist/socialist/dictatorial regimes in Eastern Europe, the poverty and the climate of terror in North Africa, the dissolution of the Yugoslavian federation, Italy joining the European Union and so forth—and they all contributed to the formation of a wave of mass immigration in the peninsula. On a daily basis, since the early nineties, mass immigration prompts the country to re-think its identity in terms of culture, religion, heritage, and to resituate itself in a European and global context, and while in literature the hyphenated identities of the contemporary diasporic writers begin to emerge, the televisual and cinematic representation of their correlatives is still missing or incomplete. As a rule, the patriarchal eye of the Italian director is still the privileged lens through which the Italian audiences see immigrants, refugees and ethnic minorities. However, some filmmakers, displaying a more perceptive sensibility than their peers on the changes that occur around them, manage to incorporate instances of multicultural openings within the ongoing narrative of a national cinema.