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When I started reading about the making of The Life Ahead, I was rather surprised to find that the film is a remake of an Oscar-winning French movie based on a prize-winning French novel.1 If I had not started reading about it,
I would have assumed that the inspiration for the screenwriter had stemmed from an Italian socio-historical background, as the story rests so comfortably in the cradle of the white-walled city of Bari, which has been and still is, a port of arrival for people escaping poverty and war in the lands south or east of Europe. I do not know if the director Edoardo Ponti's choice of Bari as a film location was driven by mundane financial concerns or otherwise, but I like to think that it was a synchronistic unconscious calling that drove him to the multi-ethnic capital of the Apulia region, one of the most interesting cities in Italy. Bari has always, in fact, been a crossroads of cultures and civilizations, a meeting place for the ‘Other’2 in its many facets: religion, culture, language, geography, cuisine. Located in the ‘heel’ of the Italian peninsula that penetrates the Ionian Sea, Bari is a door to the East; a straight line can be drawn from Naples through Bari to reach Istanbul/Constantinople, the ancient capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, where the Greek/Roman Gods met the Christian God and later on, the God of Islam.
Bari's San Nicola Cathedral is home to two faiths, Roman Catholic and Christian Orthodox. Nowadays, Bari is often at the heart of what is sometimes known as the ‘immigration crisis’ in Europe, where residents feel they are being invaded by too many foreigners, too many ‘Others’, perceived as the incarnation of various forms of enmity. Such a negative embodied representation of