Another Homeland

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Emigrating can also turn into an extraordinary adventure. They have made a radical decision. They have chosen to leave their "bitter land", as just under 30 million Italians have done in the last 100 years. They have packed their bags, crossed borders and crossed the ocean. Of all the American lands, they have chosen Quebec, an enclave with a Mediterranean flavour, where the French language is spoken, a province rooted in the Catholic tradition, always open to crossbreeding. They are men and women of great courage and resilience, inspired by a "nomadic spirit": they have preferred to be masters of their time rather than fighting, among brothers, to defend a small patch of bitter land. Some of them, going to the mining districts of the icy north, have discovered (thanks to culinary and musical "contaminations") a special complicity with the Innu "natives", who lived there well before the first waves of migration. Following the path of the Stea family from Sannicandro di Bari, who emigrated to Belgium to work in the mines, before moving to Toronto and Montreal, where they found casual jobs, and finally to the iron mines of Schefferville in the Canadian Great North, the film offers portraits of nine "economic migrants" and their children who have been able to adapt to a new life, planting new roots without losing their links with the Italian spirit.