Unit 2: Lamerica (1994)

The two main characters in Lamerica are Gino, a cynical young Italian con man and Spiro, a man in his seventies who has spent the last fifty years as a political prisoner. Gino and his partner, Fiore, have come to Albania to set up a bogus corporation and fleece their investors as well as the Albanian government. When they learn that one of the officers of the corporation needs to be Albanian, they find a old man to serve as chairman of this corporation and sign the necessary papers.

When Gino is left in charge of the old man he learns that Spiro is not Albanian at all but an Italian named Talarico who cannot come to terms with the fifty years that he lost in prison. Convinced that he is still in Italy and that he is twenty years old, Spiro/Talarico sets off on his own for his native Sicily.

Gino goes in pursuit and soon begins to lose everything with which he has defined his own life. Stripped of his possessions and identity, he becomes just another one of the displaced persons that are trying to flee Albania for promise of a better life in Italy.

Gino's journey from con man to refugee is set in 1991, during the period in which Albania was struggling to make the transition from Socialism to Capitalist/Democracy. As part of this process the country has become open to foreigners and foreign ideas and, although this offers the promise of a brighter economic future for Albania, it also creates opportunities for predators.

In Leo Goldsmith's review of the film, he proposes that Gianni Amelio's Lamerica portrays capitalist globalization as "...merely the next in a series of socio-political structures that exploits the poor and makes the life of the individual all but redundant". Seen in this light, Gino and Fiore are not just a pair of small-time con men. They are also players in a much larger culture of exploitation that includes corrupt bureaucrats as well as foreign capitalists.