Emanuele Crialese's rapturously beautiful and heartbreaking film is the story of a Sicilian family immigrating to America in 1907, and the English woman who befriends them on the journey. Salvatore, a dignified Sicilian peasant, is enticed to make the long journey by postcards from the new world featuring gigantic vegetables and gold coins hanging off the trees. Against his grandparents' advice, he packs his family and two young girls who have been promised rich American husbands, and moves toward a new life. "After countless films in which immigration plays a central role—one of the earliest was Charlie Chaplin's 1917 silent classic The Immigrant while one of the best, Jan Troell's The Emigrants, has never migrated to DVD—you'd think the canon was essentially complete. Yet this visionary work adds to it by combining harsh realities with magic-realist fantasies." (Wall Street Journal) "Virtually everything Americans know about Ellis Island they've learned from the movies, and virtually all those movies were American. Golden Door offers the other side of the story, the one that ends at Ellis Island instead of beginning there." (Miami Herald) more at goldendoor-movie.com 35mm Cinemascope
2007, color, 2 hours, Italy/Germany/France