Despite the title, the heart-wrenching feature
debut of director Andrei Kravchuk has literally nothing to do with Italy,
and everything to do with the urgent issue of illegal adoption in post-Glasnost
Russia. Six-year-old Vanya – cute as a button and crafty as the
Artful Dodger – is picked out of the mob of ragamuffins who crowd
his squalid orphanage to start a new life in Italy. Everyone thinks
Vanya is the luckiest boy alive, but Vanya worries that his real mother
will try to find him after the adoption. Plucky and determined, he plots
his escape, hotly pursued by the orphanage’s owner, who has sold
Vanya for €5000. Fascinating scenes of orphanage life introduce
a rogue’s gallery of underage hookers, pimps and junior Mafiosi,
but, as Vanya discovers, life on the streets of St Petersburg is no
picnic. “A carefully and almost classically balanced combination
of ingredients, blending dirty-faced realism (so much more damning because
it judges and condemns no one) with mystical fable of quest and homecoming.”
— Andrew O’Hehir, salon.com
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