Crialese opens America’s Golden Door
"I’m making the film I wanted to make, without worrying about audiences and critics". Emanuele Crialese feels himself to be a free director. He is currently in Paris, where he is editing his third film, The Golden Door (working title), about a Sicilian family who leaves Italy in the early 1900s, in search of a better life in America. The Italian and French producers believed in the film and invested in him after his Semaine de la Critique triumph at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival with Respiro, which starred Valeria Golino, and the film’s subsequent international success.
The film, which cost $11m, came about from an exemplary union between Italy and France: produced by Alexandre Mallet-Guy (for Memento Films ), Fabrizio Mosca (for Titti Film), RAI Cinema, Crialese himself, and a contribution from MiBAC (General Direction for Cinema for the Ministry of Culture), The Golden Door features Vincenzo Amato, Filippo Puccillo, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Francesco Casisa and Aurora Quattrocchi. The film’s DoP is Agnés Godard. It will be distributed in Italy by 01 Distribution while international sales are being handled by leading French company Wild Bunch.
In an interview in daily Italian paper La Repubblica, Crialese explained that the "journey of hope" is a much loved subject in cinema, "but my film is not a film about immigration, is it about the desire to change one’s life, to let go of something known for the unknown. It takes a lot of courage and a leap of faith and, to me, whoever has that courage is a hero".
Crialese considers The Golden Door his most personal film. He wrote the story after his first feature, Once We Were Strangers, gained the honour of being the first Italian film to ever get selected for Robert Redford’s renowned Sundance Film Festival in 1998. "I got my first $5,000 from a producer who thought, however, it was too risky a film to entrust to an unknown director. But I preferred not to give up the rights and wait for the right moment, I felt it was too much my own".
(Translated from Italian)
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