This is not the romantic Venice. A bar where the patrons run up tabs because they don't have cash. The wet and grey docks. The relationship between the young Shun Li, an immigrant from China, and the old Yugoslav fisherman, is not one that many people can accept, not even the friends of the fisherman, and the much younger Chinese woman, working like a slave to bring her son from China to Italy. Two people who are very alone find each other and it's beautiful. How can it end well? But like the gritty beauty of the side of Venice the tourists don't see, there's a beauty to the love that cannot be. The beauty of the relationship is that when two people find that they can understand each other, the relationship is a rainbow that shatters the grey sky of their dull and friendless lives. They cling to each other. They become everything to each other. Even though they both know it is impossible.

Although the film is set in Venice, don't expect beauty. It's all rather grim, unrealistically so. But ugly is the modus operandi for any director that wants to be taken "seriously," so there you go. This is the typical rubbish being made to affirm the sacred beliefs of a particular bleeding heart audience, who need to be convinced over and over again, that immigration (from 3rd world countries into Europe) is something that must simply be accepted, and that nationalism is bad. Most immigrants here are shown as saintly sensitive innocents, whilst the local working class population are portrayed as a nasty racist violent bunch of peasants. Is a film like this really necessary, when boatloads of savage Africans, rape, murder and pillage their way through Italy under the guise of being "poor refugees?" I think not.This is pathetic pantomime of the most basic kind, presented as profound drama for pseudo-intellectual libtards.

With tears in my eyes and thunder in the background, the movie ends.A young Mainland Chinese woman has somehow emigrated to Italy where she works in a factory, a café, and another factory. The story focuses on her stay at the café in a fishing village just south of Venice. The community in the village is the primary backdrop, and creates the tension between the residents and the Chinese. In particular, she meets a fellow immigrant who is considerably older than she, with whom she develops a unacceptable (according the the community) friendship.Some of it is so beautiful to look at that I am not sure of the significance, only the sensation of transformation. Even in factories, sleazy streets, fights, and fishing huts, we appreciate not only the reality but also the spirit of the scene.Maybe I have seen too many crime movies, but I was certain that her work for the freedom of her son was a scam, especially because she was moved several times, threatened with "starting over", and cloistered. Her friendship with Bepi was lovely, yet disallowed. Why? we ask. So little support was offered my work-mates. Why does this program even exist if there is so little personal concern?Lian, the roommate was another interesting character. She seems as emotionless as Shun Li and seems to have comfort in Tai Chi, thus enabling her to provide some care to Shun Li. It appears she did have deep feelings or else a very powerful sense of loss that remains unexplained. The film was education, it was touching. It was lovely and it was sad.

Set mostly in the seaside town of Chioggio, Italy, this quiet and touching independent film resonated well with me. Zhao Tao stars, in an understated and powerful performance, as Shun Li, a Chinese woman who is sent to work in Italy by the Chinese mafia, in what very well could be described as "indentured servitude". She's closely watched and supervised by her Chinese "handlers" who tell her when and where to go for work. However, each time she's transfered debts accrue on her account which keep delaying her "getting the news", which is that she's paid her account off and that her 8 year old son can be sent to join her.In Chiaggio, where Shun Li is working as a bartender and waitress at a local cafe, she meets Bepi, or as his friends call him The Poet because he's always making up rhymes. Superbly portrayed by Rade Sherbedglia, Bepi is a kindly retired fisherman, recently widowed, who likes to hang out at the cafe with his friends. I've recently seen "Taken 2", where Sherbedglia plays an evil Albanian crime family boss. Here, he gets the chance to portray a sensitive "good guy" and he doesn't disappoint.Bepi and Shun Li become friends, as they find out they have a number of things in common. Shun Li, as it turns out, comes from a long line of fishermen ancestors, plus Bepi originally came from a Communist country Yugoslavia. However, their main bond is that Shun Li is a devout believer in celebrating the soul of Qu Yuan, the foremost poet of Chines tradition. Each year at the Festival of the Poet, she honors him with floating a lit lantern on a river or body of water. So the fact that Bepi is considered a poet just solidifies their friendship.When Shun Li's and Bepi's friendship gets deeper emotionally, it leads to rumor mongering among his friends and a strict warning from her "handlers" that she must end this friendship with a foreigner or that she'll have to start her debt to them all over again. This will eventually lead to dark and dramatic consequences for all concerned.I thought the movie was well paced and directed by Andrea Segre, who also co-wrote the script with Marco Pettenello.Overall, if you like quiet and emotionally interesting foreign films that are well acted and tell a good story, you may very well like this one.