No se admiten perros ni italianos

An animated film that gets off to an awkward start, with the author's clumsy voice-over as narrator slowing things down. Then, as we move on to the characters and their migration, the film's drama arouses interest, and the film manages to conjure up snatches of emotion from time to time.

Alain Ughetto tells the story of his Italian family in the early 20th century, of poverty and immigration to France. Through various key moments in the family's history, and in the short history of the world (the rise of Fascism in Italy, the Second World War, the German occupation of France, liberation, racism). This is the most interesting dimension: the animated film shows the precarious condition of immigrants.

This movie has a very unique style. It's a stop motion clay animation... but with human hands intervening in key parts and building the sets in real time ! And the hand belongs to the author and interacts and dialogues with his grandmother who is one of the clay characters. The result is deeply personal and very touching.

On a superficial level, it's a story of immigrants and their struggle with racism and integration, but that's actually only a minor point, the main one being the continuity of family while coping with displacement, extreme poverty, fascism...

The movie is given as PG-13 but my 9yo franco-italian (like in the movie!) enjoyed it.

Being one of the oldest techniques used in animation cinema, stop motion has been reborn, in recent decades, as a privileged vehicle for many authors (who doesn't remember Tim Burton's famous animations in the 90s), after a period of of relative oblivion.

The vintage effect seems to attract new authors, who complement it with digital techniques and artistic daring, such as mixing real and animated images, as an integral part of the narrative. Here, the director himself, through his voice and a hand, interferes in the story, like a true character.

Technique aside, the film is a tribute to the director's grandparents' generation, to the time of migrants, who fled from hunger, on their mountain villages, in search of work abroad. Where they endured, with a smile on their lips and recognized patriotism, the racist humiliations of their hosts, because you should not bite the hand that feeds you.

A work for future memory, of a time of misery, war and survival, which contrasts, so much, with the comfort and pride of subsequent generations.

As my grandmother used to say, they are all rich now!

Through using doll-animation, (very nice made dolls!) the true story of a family which has to go through a lot, comes very close. The storyteller present the story in a very nice, artistic way. The intermingled show of a bodypart of the real storyteller give some extra spices. I also learned quite a bit over history, how all what happend between late 19th cenutey and now to personal lives.

Some other opinions: To tell the story of a gift-hands-on skills and the courage to work the land to live and raise a family-inherited from an Italian grandfather from Piedmont... a slice of Italian history between the 19th and 20th centuries, who worked between Italy, Switzerland, and France with courage and determination to "make it" and support a family. A beautiful idea and a great poetic touch for creating clay characters, which take the viewer on a journey through the different stages of the grandfather's journey to establish his family in France and obtain naturalization, using a few well-chosen archival images. Moving. Sober.

This little stop-motion film is fantastic. I loved the way where the reality of the little clay figures and their author interact, I loved how the tone is always measured, never shrill or pathetic, and how the story is simple and relatable, even if you are not an Italian or an immigrant.

I wish that I could conjure my grandmother how the author does, and portray my own family past in the same vivid way. I am surprised that this film, at the moment of writing, has only a rating of 7.2. This is a mini masterpiece, full of creativity and emotion.

There is a little mystery around the runtime: I saw it today at the Italian Film Festival in London, and it was definitely shorter than the advertised run of 1h 20m. Some themes, like the titular one of anti-Italian racism, are very underdeveloped, barely touched at all. I wonder if it has been re-edited after release.

Nevermind, go and see it, it's a delight.