Genre: Drama

Language: Italian with English Subtitles

Director: Marco Tullio Giordana

Cast: Alessio Boni, Michela Cescon, Matteo Gadola, Rodolfo Corsato, Ester Hazan

Released: 2005

Duration: 116 Minutes

Rating: M contains drug use and offensive language

Distribution: Palace Films

Winner 2005 Globi d’Oro – Best Film, Best New Actor x 2; 2005 Cannes Film festival – winner Francois Chalais award, nominated Golden Palm

The compelling new film from multi-award winning director Marco Tullio Giordana (‘The best of youth’, ‘100 steps’) is both a tremendously moving coming of age story and a sensitively observed portrait of an Italy that’s coming to terms with its relatively new status as a multicultural society as well as illegal immigration.

Thirteen year-old Sandro (impressive newcomer Matteo Gadola) is from Brescia in northern Italy, only son of a family that in just two generations has achieved significant wealth.  One night, during a sailing trip through the Mediterranean, Sandro falls overboard.  Initially given up for dead, Sandro is instead eventually rescued, and finds himself on an overcrowded fishing boat carrying illegal immigrants to Italian shores.

Thus begins an adventurous return to Italy.  Confronting hitherto unknown encounters, expectations, rejections, hopes and disillusionments, Sandro has crossed over that thin line between adolescence and adulthood, where nothing can be as it was before.

From the novel by Maria Pace Ottieri, with same name.

“Among the most socially conscious of today's helmers, Marco Tullio Giordana follows his microcosm of late 20th-century Italian history, ‘The best of youth’, with a clear look at a current political hot potato: clandestine immigrants”  Jay Weissberg, Variety