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synopsis
Shun Li works in a textile factory in the outskirts of Rome, in order to get her papers and enable her eight-year-old son to come to Italy. She is suddenly transferred to Chioggia, a small city-island in the Veneto lagoon, to work as a bartender in a pub. Bepi, a Slavic fisherman, nicknamed “the Poet” by his friends, has been a regular at that little pub for years. The friendship between Shun Li and Bepi upsets both the Chinese and local communities, who interfere with this new voyage, which they are perhaps simply too afraid of. “I still remember my encounter with a woman who could have been Shun Li. It was in a typical Veneto pub, where local fishermen had been going for generations. The memory of this woman’s face, so extraneous and foreign to these places weathered by time and worn by habit, has never left me.” (Andrea Segre)


Whilst it may have a genesis in real life situations (Chinese immigrants' coming to work in the environs of Venice) IO SONO LI isn't docu-drama. Nor is it a potentially trite suspend-your-disbelief love affair between a young woman and an old man. Instead this understated, impressive first feature is a far more subtle affair, depicting a fragile friendship, springing up out of loneliness, its delicacy crudely misunderstood and destroyed by the disbelief of others. Segre is nonetheless an optimist and his film exudes life and hope embodied by its sensitive, but resilient female heroine. IO SONO LI is also embellished by its director's fresh cinematic eye on The Venetian Lagoon, shooting its naturalistic, real working-life beauty in a way that is a million miles from picture-post-card tourism. (Adrian Wootton).

>Click here< to listen to the audio introduction to the film with exclusive extras, courtesy by Subti