Le ferie di Licu

Licu's Holidays

by Vittorio Moroni

Italy 2006; 93 min

Licu and Fancy are two young Muslims. He lives in Rome, she in Bangladesh: they do not know one another. Their families arrange their marriage. Fancy moved to Rome one year ago, and since then they have been striving to learn to live together.

The young Bengali immigrant Licu is an optimistic happiness seeker. Flexible, hard-working and charming, he has secured a job in Rome in a field that is dear to him: fashion. But despite his remarkable adaptability, he finds himself stuck between the Muslim customs he was raised with and the Italian way of life. For one thing, his female colleagues in Rome are far less inhibited than he is accustomed to. When a letter arrives containing a photo of his future bride that his parents have chosen for him, it seems he will be able to combine Bangladesh and Italy in one and the same future. This turns out to be easier said than done. The marriage negotiations do not progress very smoothly, floods ravage his native land, and his Italian employer shows little understanding for his long absence. But when he returns to Rome with his bride, the true challenges await him.
Filmed in an unemphatic but intimate manner, Licu's Holidays becomes a probing sociological exploration of a widespread dilemma for immigrants: which culture should these newlyweds use as a basis for their relationship in their new homeland? The images of a woman locked up at home make you fear the worst, but her desire for freedom leaves you feeling optimistic.
Source: IDFA

I did my best to prevent the subjective perspective of my gaze from immediately turning into a judgement on what was going on around me; I wanted my gaze to reveal itself only through the attention paid to certain details, certain silences and certain gazes. I tried to bring up the same questions that were urgent for me, leaving to the viewer’s sensitivity the possibility of freely relating to the main character’s contradictions – suspended between two worlds and two sets of values – and the story’s contradictions, running through the surprising unraveling of events, but also through their underground violence.
Source: Director Vittorio Moroni, Alba IFF

Cast and Crew

Festivals & awards

• 2008 Hot Docs - Canadian International Documentary Festival, Toronto
• 2007 Alba International Film Festival
• 2007 Villerupt Italian Film Festival: Best Film
• 2007 BosArt-Sardegna: Best Film
• 2007 IDFA - International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam: Best of Fest

More information

• Official website (in Italian only)
• Pressbook (PDF; 1.72MB)
• Trailer (subtitled)

Biography

Born in the Alps, Vittorio Moroni got an early interest in storytelling, writing short stories, and in photography. Yet, he had no particular interest in cinema: "Before 19, I watched most films on tape or TV, because the choice of movie theatres in Sondrio was quite poor". While at university in Milan, attending classes in Aesthetics and Philosophy, his interest in cinema finally gained momentum: he enrolled into the Milan Municipal Film School, and graduated in Film Direction in 1995. In the same year, he made the short Quasi una storia (Almost a Story), followed in 1997 by Eccesso di zelo (Eccessive Zeal), which received awards in Nanni Moretti's Sacher Festival and in numerous European Festivals.
Immidiately he considered shooting short films as a training experience towards full-length features, his true call. He directed a 33-minutes short, with no dialogue, La Terra vista da Marte (Earth as Seen from Mars), and later he started to work on the documentary format.
In the meanwhile he attended a Directing Masterclass at the Universal Pictures Studios, in Los Angeles, California. In 1999 he returned to Italy, with a strong will to pursue further his research on documentaries. "Documentary as investigation, also into screenwriting, into the footprints of the events. Documentaries possess the beauty of using the camera like a pen, so being very different from making a fictional film, even with a small budget." Therefore, a documentary can also be a narration. With his two stories, Sulle tracce del gatto (Following the Cat's Trail; 1998) and Una rivoluzione (A Revolution; 2003), he twice won the Solinas Award.
He now lives in Rome, where, in 2005, he fulfilled his experience with the feature Tu devi essere il lupo (You Must Be the Wolf), which won several festival awards and is known as a first-time experiment in self-organized film distribution.
MySelf Distribution works as a sort of cultural association to which all members of the cast and crew belong, from actors to technicians. With a 5-Euro membership, anyone can enter the project too, with access to film screenings. In this way, the interest gathered around the project of Tu devi essere il lupo incredibly allowed the collection of 40,000 Euros, which was used to effectively distribute the film in Italian movie theaters. In 2007, with the same distribution strategy, Moroni made a second full-length film, again blending documentary and fiction: Le ferie di Licu.
Source: MyMovies