Six year old Vanya Solntsev lives in a crowded rough orphanage in remote Russia. An Italian couple arrives looking to adopt him. He gains the nickname "The Italian". Despite pressure to go to Italy, he becomes obsessed with finding his birth mother. With the help of the older kids, they steal his file and he runs away to track her down.It's a brutal and yet slightly touching world of an unusual family. It takes a little while to center the movie around the little boy. Honestly, the movie needs to point the camera at the kid and follow him for the first twenty minutes. There are so many little kids that it takes too long to pick him out of the pack. Other than that, this is a good Dickensian tale. It has violence but the kids live in this world as if it's normal.

One of the reviewers was trying to convince us that this movie is nationalist, because it portrays orphanages and their staff in negative light. I have to strongly disagree. The bleakness of day to day life in Russia in transition, that this film vividly brings to life, can hardly be a fodder for any nationalist propaganda. Most of Hollywood movies are way more nationalist and self-deluding than anything we saw in this powerful little movie. Director Andrei Kravchuk tells this tragic, but ultimately uplifting story with just the right amount of sentiment.It ends with a slight touch of fairytale. After all, most of the time, life is a mix of tragedy and endless hope.

_The Italian_ is a touching film about the precious humanity of one orphaned, six-year-old Russian boy. The film has many strong points, and it is hard not to be moved by the child's desperate, purblind plight.However, the unfortunate political subtext of this film seems utterly lost on all of the other reviewers here thus far. In short, our natural compassion for abandoned children's welfare is manipulated by this movie, and the resulting impact of this film in Russia has been and will be precisely the abandonment of thousands of precious children who would otherwise have stable, loving homes. This film lies squarely in the detestable Russian tradition of using the plight of the multitudes of Russian orphans to score nationalistic political points. Note how this film would affect someone who knows nothing about the true situation of orphans in the Russian Federation. The viewer would come away feeling that orphanages are filled with greedy administrators eager to "sell children" to "foreigners"-- children who really belong in their "homeland," because, after all, the film subtly implies, the "loss" of these children to foreigners is somehow connected to the loss of national prestige in Russia. Many a nationalistic politician in Russia has made precisely this political pose, and the direct result of this has been the unnecessary, continued suffering and abandonment of untold thousands of Russian orphans. This film masquerades as a plea for children's welfare, but it has only hurt the very children it pretends to defend.I have worked in Russian orphanages. The reality this craven and ignorant film denies? The staff of orphanages are, by and large, without doubt the great, unsung heroes of Russia, and there are thousands upon thousands of desperate children whose placement in stable and loving homes has been HALTED because of politicians who push the imbecilic and inhuman chauvinistic ideology seen in this film.

The Italian/Italianetz is a good use of neorealistic effects almost worthy of Zavattini and De Sica to tell the story of a Russian orphan at the present time, a boy of six who's set up for adoption by an Italian couple and then determines to sneak off and see if he can find his own mother instead. Arranging adoptions on a freelance basis, apparently, outside the chaotic social system of present-day Russia, is a lady they call Madam (Mariya Koznetsova), plump, bossy, slick, followed around by a glum factotum, Grisha (Nikolai Reutov), who's her chauffeur, toady, and sometime lover. She makes a bundle out of each successful adoption by foreigners and makes free with bribes and threats to be sure her deals go through. A product of modern Russian capitalism, the money-mad Madam is more villain than fairy godmother.Using a photo followed up by an on-site interview at the detsky dom (children's home), Madam has arranged with an Italian couple, Roberto and Claudia, to adopt young Vanya Sonetsiv (Kolya Spridonov). But then when Vanya meets up with a remorseful drunken mom who apparently commits suicide after learning her child has been adopted and taken to Ialy, he gets the urge to investigate his own record. Everybody acts like he's such a lucky guy. But supposing he goes off with Roberto and Claudia? Mightn't he miss out on a chance to be reunited with his own mother, should she have a change of heart and want him back? Is there such a chance, though? And where is his mother? To find out, first Vanya has to learn to read – a detail the orphanage has neglected – and find a way to get a look at his file.The detsky dom's administration is not exactly on the up-and-up. The wild looking director (Yuri Itskov) is drinking up all the funds, and to fill in the vacuum this leaves a small clique of older boys to pretty much run the place and its finances, like a rawly capitalistic petty mafia, sporting scars, tattoos and muscles and throwing around words like "cosa nostra." Led by a boy named Kolyan (Denis Moiseenko), they have their own little systems of businesses and payoffs. And this shadow regime, up to a point anyway, really seems to work. The kids' beds are clean, and the girls mend their clothes and read them fairy tales at bedtime. But it's clear there's no pathway to a better future in the life here. Vanya, whom everybody now calls "the Italian" because of the good fortune they feel he's destined for when the papers go through in a month or so, now wangles his way in with the older boys, and they help him out. Among these undergrown mafiosi is a girl named Irka (Olga Shuvalova) who they pimp out to truck drivers. It's she who teaches Vanya to read. The big boys help Vanya break into the room where the records are kept and he gets the address of the maternal home where he came from, and Irka takes Vanya to the railway station, having robbed the boys' current till and intending to run off with him. Madam immediately finds out that Vanya has disappeared and, standing to lose her payoff if she can't deliver him to the Italian couple, she sets off in hot pursuit with Grisha.What follows is a wild chase in which Vanya shows what he's made of. Nothing, and that includes some pretty rough scrapes, can stop him from his relentless flight and quest. The Italian never loses its authentic flavor either as it moves toward an emotionally satisfying if somewhat hasty finish Still, it's obviously in the first half of the film that we get our best look at this world and its people and the Russian orphan problem. It might even have been a better treatment of that issue if some of the earlier scenes had been allowed to play out a bit longer.The San Francisco Chronicle's venerable Ruthe Stein called this the best "naturalistic performance by a Russian child actor since Kolya a decade ago." Spiridonov is very effective and appealing in his role, and perhaps The Italian has some links with that somewhat saccharine earlier film. But The Italian is more chastening than Kolya. A more appropriate recent comparison (and another great youth performance in Russian) is the picaresque, unpredictable Schizo (2004), directed by Guldchat Omarova with the 15-year-old Oldzhas Nusupbayev. The Italian isn't saccharine, but it's also not as grim a view of the plight of lost Russian children as Lukas Moodysson's deeply depressing 2002 film Lilja 4-Ever. See all four and decide for yourself which feels like the most convincing and cinematic story of Russian childhood. You'll have to consider whether Kravchuk undercuts or strengthens his material by turning it into a fairy tale. It was the urge to depict a growing social problem and at the same time tell an engaging story that must have drown a documentarian like Kravchuk to this subject. He has worked well with his non-actors and his writer Andrei Romanov, and Aleksandr Burov has provided a misty, subtly colored cinematography.