Sandro accompanies his father on a sailing trip through the Greek islands when he becomes drowsy and slips overboard. He is then rescued from the vast expanses by a passing barge which is run by shifty people smugglers and is wall-to-wall with desperate Eastern European refugees. Once You’re Born You Can No Longer Hide follows Sandro as he boards and makes friends with Radu a young Romanian and his sister Alina whose hardship shows Sandro a reality and fosters a cultural awakening. Through the potential loss of their son and his subsequent experiences, parents Bruno and Lucia are forced to re-evaluate their own ethics relating to the way they exploit workers of non-Italian backgrounds in their own profitable factory.
Marco Tullio Giordana was born in Milan on 1st October 1950. During the 1970s he was intensely involved in politics. After entering the world of the cinema, he collaborated with Roberto Faenza on “Forza Italia” (1977) and made his feature debut with “Maledetti, vi amerò” (1979), which was presented at the Cannes Film Festival and won first prize at Locarno.
He went on to write the screenplay for Antonio Margheriti’s “Car crash” (1981) and returned to a directing role with the ambitious and unresolved "La caduta degli angeli ribelli "(1981), where – like in his debut work – the scene is occupied by the problematic figures of terrorists. In 1982, he directed the musical video of Benjamin Britten’s “Young person’s guide to the orchestra” for the Salsomaggiore festival. Two years later, he made a successful two-part small-screen adaptation of Carlo Castellaneta’s novel “Notti e nebbie” about a fascist living in Milan in the twilight of the Republic of Salò.
In 1987 he directed… read more
Dramatisation on Italy’s immigrant influx. Contrasting Moretti’s social realism, Giordana swaps the subtlety of such satiric, cutting commentaries with illustrations far more heavy-handed - economic, religious and language frictions; people smugglers, hustlers - a regular humanitarian checklist. Gratefully, his more benign portraits of life in modern Italy provide some natural, brief respite; on either front, some editing wouldn’t hurt the piece any more than its present faux-realist, idealist state.
