This is a filmic reflection on Southern Italy as it changes from a place of emigration to a destination for immigration. The film begins in a graveyard of refugee ships on Lampedusa. It shows the wrecks of boats which the refugees use to cross the Mediterranean Sea. It is estimated that around 10.000 people have drowned in the Straight of Sicily over the last 10 years. The film continues in Calabria, in one of those timeless villages with shrinking local populations. We visit the former Rosarno factory (Reggio Calabria), where around 300 immigrants built barricades in December 2008 in protest against recurring violence. We meet migrants who come for the winter to work in the orange, tangerine and olive harvest. The film ends as it begins, with photographs by Antonio Murgeri. This time, they are from the area around Naples in the South, which is confronted with the task of taking in all the desperate people fleeing from hunger and war. Often migrants also flee to northern Italy, which is dominated by the Lega Nord, whose prejudices, rejection and xenophobic laws forces them to move involuntarily to the Italian Mezzogiorno. This region lacks the resources and infrastructure to accommodate all these drifting people in an adequate way. People therefore share what little they have in the midst of violence and exploitation.
“With IL NUOVO SUD DELL’ITALIA I sought predominantly to create a vein of subjectivity and poetry not typically found in documentaries, so that the viewer can receive a proper perception of the message, derived from images, from silences and from noises rather than from information.” (Pino Esposito)
