Elisabetta Sgarbi’s new film, Colpa di comunismo, which was recently screened at the Torino Film Festival, is a documentary-fiction hybrid: it’s a documentary in the sense that it records the stories, fears and passions of three Romanian women looking for work, and a fiction film in that the three women in question are clearly acting.

We’re in Fabriano and, following an orthodox mass which takes up a good ten minutes of the film’s runtime, two middle-aged Romanian women make their way into the vestry to ask if there are any odd jobs for which they will obviously find themselves underpaid. Thus begins the odyssey which leads the film’s protagonists, whose number grows inexplicably to three, to travel to Ferrara in search of new opportunities.

It’s a worthy subject, but the film doesn’t achieve any real result: it’s not clear whether the director is looking to denounce the difficulties the three women experience in finding work, to tell us something we don’t already know about the conditions faced by carers in Italy, or to reveal close-up the degree to which Romanians maintain their traditions once they find themselves on Italian soil.

Any discussions touching upon migrants’ living conditions, the extent to which they integrate with the local community, or the difficulties they face in their everyday struggle for life are barely sketched out; there’s only an intention of realism, and there’s no trace of candour or spontaneity in the non-professional actors’ performances. We know little to nothing about the male characters in the movie, yet they’re chosen to open and close the film in what might be described as a dubious editing decision: is the author looking to convey the boredom felt by her characters by boring her audience?

In short, the only wise decision made with this film is the argument it chooses to tackle: behind the unemployment and misery that foreigners face in Italy, there are some stories which are worth stopping and listening to, as long as they’re told well, of course.