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About The Production
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" - Emma Lazarus
GOLDEN DOOR, with an original mix of both magical and provocatively authentic visuals, turns the classic tale of coming to America into a wondrous and soulful experience. It is a romantic fable that takes audiences into the very heart of this quintessential American experience – as one man, driven by fantastic dreams and confronted with shocking realities, makes an epic odyssey in search of a brand new world. On a perilous steamship journey from his Sicilian village, the widower Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato) encounters a ravishing, mystery-shrouded Englishwoman, Lucy (Charlotte Gainsbourg, THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP) – as the Old World literally collides into the New with seductive results. Amid a harrowing crossing, an unexpected love story unfolds all the way to the halls of Ellis Island, where both Salvatore and Lucy will stop at nothing to make it through the GOLDEN DOOR to the America of their imaginations. It all begins with the lonely farmer Salvatore, who leads an ancient kind of existence, buoyed by the cycles of nature and his simple faith, in his tiny Sicilian village. But Salvatore yearns for a better life, one he believes only exists in the fabled land known as America. According to the postcards that come to him like a sign from above, in America awaits a sensational Garden of Eden – where carrots grow taller than men, rivers flow with milk and golden coins rain from the trees. Ready to risk everything for such a miraculous realm, Salvatore makes the momentous decision to sell everything he has – his land, his home, his animals – in order to take the unimaginable passage with his two sons, handsome Angelo (Francesco Casisa) and the deaf-mute Pietro (Filippo Pucillo), as well as his elderly mother, Fortunata. Holding tight to the enchanted superstitions that once kept them going, they join the throngs hoping to board a transatlantic ocean liner headed for New York City. There, they find themselves amidst scores of other peasants, profiteers and one alluring, red-headed Englishwoman, Lucy, who will strike a bargain with Salvatore that will change their crossing into a crescendoing romantic alliance, built not on common language or experiences but transcendent emotions. But neither Salvatore nor Lucy is prepared for the arrival at Ellis Island, also known as the “Island of Tears,” where families are inspected, interrogated and sometimes split apart in heartbreaking decisions. Here is where they will have to bravely face their own dilemmas, as they become part of one of the most extraordinary transformations in history – leaving the past behind to be reborn in a new future as modern Americans. Miramax Films presents GOLDEN DOOR, written and directed by Emanuele Crialese. The producers are Alexandre Mallet-Guy, Fabrizio Mosca and Crialese. The executive producers are Bernard Bouix and Tommaso Calevi. The film stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vincenzo Amato, Aurora Quattrocchi, Francesco Casisa, Filippo Pucillo, Federica de Cola and Isabella Ragonese.
ISLAND OF HOPE, ISLAND OF TEARS: ELLIS ISLAND INSPIRES ANOTHER MAGICAL JOURNEY TO AMERICA
Forty percent of all Americans can trace their roots directly to an ancestor who came through Ellis Island. Yet, few today can truly imagine what each one of these remarkable men, women and children – bold pioneers every one of them – experienced as they set out for a totally mysterious realm ready to exchange the only lives they’d ever known for a brand new world in which they would have to completely reinvent themselves. It is this mind-boggling transformation that rising writer/director Emanuele Crialese brings to the fore in vibrantly creative and poignant ways in his third and most accomplished film, GOLDEN DOOR. His film follows one man and one woman, whom fates places on the same massive steamship bound for America -- yet captures in magical images and a romantic turn of events what the adventurous trip represented to tens of millions. “I have sought to tell the story of my heroes, those of a past era who believed in the importance of mystery, and who saw things that could not be seen, which did not mean they didn’t exist,” says Crialese, who made his own eye-opening journey to the US from his native Rome in the 1990s to study film at NYU. He went on to make his debut in New York with the romantic comedy ONCE WE WERE STRANGERS. He then garnered widespread international acclaim with his second film, this time shot in Italian, RESPIRO, about a free-spirited woman who becomes a legend on a small Sicilian island. But the experience of leaving one country for another would remain pivotal to him. “In a way, GOLDEN DOOR was born out of my own experience of being an immigrant in the U.S. and how it changed me,” he says. “I learned that identity is a magical phenomenon because I wasn’t really aware of my own culture until I was confronted with another culture. I had to reinvent myself, I had to live for a dream – and it is this story of a man leaving his country for a dream that I decided to tell.” For Crialese, the inspiration for GOLDEN DOOR began at the same place where so many American stories got their start: Ellis Island, that tiny blip of land in the New York Harbor that would become a gigantic symbol of hope for the colossal wave of new immigrants at the turn of the century. Here, in the first couple of decades of 20th century, an incredible 12 million people from all over the planet staggered off of ships, the few remnants of their former lives stuffed into threadbare bags, and walked into a country unlike anything they had ever known or expected. These millions of hard-working laborers, grounded in earthiness yet driven by sky-high dreams, would become the very bedrock of American society, accelerating the nation’s dizzying economic ascent in the 20th Century. Yet for all the exhilarating fantasies it represented, Ellis Island also turned into a harrowing modern reality for some. It became alternately known as “The Island of Hope” and “The Island of Tears” – because thousands who were branded as unfit to enter America, based on the then accepted “science” of Eugenics, were sent right back to the Old World, tearing apart families and irrevocably breaking hearts. It was while staring at the photographs in the Ellis Island Museum, that Crialese became mesmerized by the look on the faces of so many of the new arrivals, a look, still so powerfully alive, that seemed to transcend their vastly diverse nationalities and backgrounds. The unmistakable mix of shock, fear and hope in their unforgettable gazes were all the inspiration he needed to start writing GOLDEN DOOR. He knew he was entering vaunted territory – after all, masterful Hollywood directors ranging from Elia Kazan to Francis Ford Coppola have tackled the question of what it means to be an American immigrant in a broad range of cinema classics. But Crialese also wanted to bring a new and different view, one built on both extensive research into the real Ellis Island experience and his own contrasting passion for magical realism and dream-like storytelling. Feeling a deep connection to those who came before him from Italy to America, he hoped to go beyond the impersonal idea of “the immigrant masses” encountered in history books – and instead create a more deeply human love story about one man’s total transformation, as his world is rocked not only by stormy seas and unthinkable changes, but a woman whose modern wiles capture his heart. “I wanted to retrieve the personal element,” says Crialese, “to tell the story of a man who leaves behind his homeland to undergo a complete metamorphosis, changing from an ancient to a modern man in the course of his journey.” He began his work on the screenplay first by delving, over a period of weeks, into the extensive Ellis Island archives, learning from remarkably honest, gritty and detailed first-hand accounts about all the phases a family that journeyed from Sicily to America in 1910 would go through. During this time, he also became acquainted with the blatantly surreal, paradise-like imagery that first sparked so many Italians to see America as their savior– which came in the form of newfangled, photo-manipulated postcards showing a downright heavenly land of plenty right out of fairy tales. These images would become a core element in the magical style of GOLDEN DOOR. “These were supposedly ‘real-life’ images,” the director explains, “these doctored photographs of little men standing next to giant vegetables, that arrived to great excitement and belief in these rural villages. It was a kind of early ‘propaganda’ that encouraged many to leave behind their arid farmland for a place where bounty appeared to be guaranteed. In the case of my characters, who are pure dreamers, these images turned into phantasms.” Those who were driven by their dreams to leave their homelands did so by scraping together the money to purchase tickets on the huge steamships that profited from this teeming, seemingly bottomless, market of yearning emigrants. For the sum of about $30 – a life’s fortune to many impoverished Europeans, causing many to sell everything but the clothes on their backs -- you could purchase a third class ticket in exchange for hazardous, cramped quarters and just enough food to survive the crossing. Once families made the agonizing decision to leave everything they had on this earth behind, their journeys became remarkable adventures – as thrilling and unpredictable as space travel might be to contemporary city dwellers. They often arrived at the ports on donkeys or wagons, having never seen anything like a boat that could carry thousands. Getting on the ship itself was a complex process that involved a maze of inspections and potential quarantines by the steamer lines who did not want to have to return the would-be immigrants back to Europe. Those who passed, were led down the gangplanks, deep into the ship’s bowels and the dark, dank, horrifically crowded steerage dormitories that would be their home for the long ocean crossing. Thus began their literal rite of passage. Crialese found himself especially wrapped up in and moved by the “parole di carta” or “paper words”– letters sent to relatives back at home – he found in the archives at Ellis Island. Week after week, he read through hundreds of them, wondering about the courageous people who wrote them, their journeys and the lives they started in America. “These were people who were now working 20 hour days in factories, yet they always wrote to their loved ones back home that the streets were paved in gold,” notes Crialese. “No matter what they were experiencing, they kept alive the idea that America was beautiful.” With his imagination sparked by these real lives, Crialese began to invent the fictional Salvatore Mancuso, who must completely break with his old ideas about the world as he leaves his primal life of magic and wonder in Sicily behind. For Salvatore, who has lived in one small village with his family all his life, even the rest of Italy is a mystery, let alone America – and Crialese reveals both the raw simplicity of his former way of life and the exhilaration of his decision to start anew. “Salvatore is a man who has lived all his life with a strong sense of identity, based on stories told by his father and grandfather before him,” Crialese says of his lead character. “The few square kilometers of land on which he has lived, and which he has never left, constitute a world populated by invisible presences. This man knows and respects nature and its moods, because his very survival depends on their relationship. He is a man at one with his environment; he notices every stone, every smell, every barely perceptible change. In leaving, this man must abandon everything he knows, the place to which he belongs, his very memory.” He continues: “To quote a description, which I find beautiful, taken from a letter written by one of these men while facing the spectacular ocean crossing: ‘We are all souls in flight, but we are dying with each passing wave.’ This is the story of GOLDEN DOOR, the story of a journey that changed so many.”
POKED, PRODDED, TRANSFORMED: A BRIEF GUIDE TO THE ELLIS ISLAND EXPERIENCE
With GOLDEN DOOR, Emanuele Crialese brings to audiences one of the most stirringly detailed looks at an essential American experience – the passage through Ellis Island – ever seen on the cinematic screen. For the millions of immigrants arriving from Europe, having spent an often dangerous and dizzying passage at sea, the arrival at Ellis Island, with its desperate crowds, its urban hubbub and its unexpected interrogations, was a total shock to the system. Few were prepared for what they would have to go through to actually enter America. Crialese spent more than a year researching the precise procedures and protocols that were carried out at Ellis Island in the early 20th century, uncovering the vertiginous modern labyrinth that immigrants had to navigate through with no reference whatsoever. Within this maze, overwhelmed families were subjected to surprising Eugenics-style tests and exams, expressly designed to weed out those with potential physical and mental disabilities, for fear they would weaken the growing nation. Indeed, U.S. Federal Immigration Law stipulated that immigration officials must exclude “all idiots, insane persons, paupers or persons likely to become public charges and persons suffering from a loathsome or dangerous contagious diseases.” But the interpretation of such terms could also be steeped in racial stereotyping and cultural misunderstandings – and the execution of the tests to determine who was and wasn’t fit turned thousands into unsuspecting “guinea pigs” for controversial scientific studies. “I discovered that Ellis Island was not simply a processing centre and temporary shelter for the new arrivals -- it was also a kind of laboratory-archive,” Crialese explains. “After weeks at sea in steerage, these Sicilian emigrants were disembarked on the island and immediately inspected by American Naval personnel. Medical examinations were carried out on the spot to detect any diseases or disabilities that would have prevented them from working -- and those who displayed them were deported. Those who proved physically sound were subjected to intelligence or aptitude tests: the first mental tests carried out on the masses of which there is historical evidence. These intelligence and aptitude examinations carried out on all the races that came to America from all the four corners of the earth were recorded, and have come down to us as the first Eugenics studies carried out on such a large scale.” Having seen what the reality of Ellis Island was like, Crialese did not want to white-wash what a family like the Mancusos would have experienced there -- and he reveals their trek through the massive processing center in GOLDEN DOOR in eye-opening and suspenseful detail. After so many wild dreams of America, suddenly it became starkly real for immigrants as they encountered investigators and doctors, not to mention such novel concepts as plumbing and cafeterias, for the first time. The nerve-wracking process began for immigrants as soon as they walked up the stairs to the infamous Registry Room, where throngs of people, as many as 10,000 a day, all speaking different languages, gathered in a great cacophony of coughs, cries and sometimes curses. After waiting in line for 4 or 5 hours, one by one, the exhausted and hungry were shepherded forward to legal inspection, which examined the immigrant’s social, economic and moral aptitude with a series of questions about their backgrounds, future plans and how much money they had brought with them. Unaccompanied women had to provide proof that they were being met by a relative or were prepared to be married at Ellis Island. These initial questions were followed by quick (it was sometimes called the “6-second exam”) but unforgiving medical inspections, designed to look for lameness or blindness, especially that caused by Trachoma, an eye infection common among the poor, which resulted in the infamous “eyelid-flipping test” at Ellis Island, seen in the film. Throats, hands, chests and scalps were then investigated for wheezing, sores, parasites, abnormalities or any obvious condition that would make it difficult to work. The exams could be truly terrifying for many, especially for the thousands who had never had their bodies touched by anyone other than a spouse or family member before. The unlucky ones who didn’t pass the initial medical procedures were marked with mystifying chalk letters – ranging from E for “eyes” to S for “senility” – and subjected to further exams. Immigrants were also taken to “mental inspections,” which could involve puzzles, math problems and the newly developed “IQ” test, all of which could be terribly intimidating to illiterate peasants who had little need for such skills back at home. These tests were designed not only to turn away those considered mentally unfit, but, unbeknownst to the immigrants, to provide additional research on the intelligence of different races, information that was passed along to the U.S. Congress in 1924 when it set quotas for immigrants from different countries. It was also at Ellis Island that IQ expert and Eugenicist Henry Goddard conducted heavily biased and dangerously influential research – research which led him to infamously declare that a majority of Jews, Hungarians, Italians and Russians were “feeble-minded.” But all the immigrants themselves knew of this battery of tests was that those who didn’t pass were pulled from the line and taken to detainment cells. Ultimately, some would be permanently turned away – resulting in people being torn from their loved ones and wrenching dilemmas about how and whether to split up families. Overall, about 15% of those coming through Ellis Island were pulled out of line to undergo further examinations or legal procedures, while another 2% (in a typical year, such as 1911, this worked out to nearly 17,000 people) were deported right back on the long return trip to Europe, at the shipping company’s expense. But the vast majority of those arriving at Ellis Island passed through the “golden door” – and would try to create a life in America that might match the intensity and beauty of their dreams.
THE OLD WORLD SEDUCED BY THE NEW: CASTING VINCENZO AMATO AND CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG IN AN UNLIKELY ROMANCE
At the heart of GOLDEN DOOR is the collision of the Old World with the New, which is literally played out with the seductive meeting of Salvatore Mancuso, who has never left his small Sicilian village, and the worldly Lucy, a mysterious Englishwoman whom he decides to protect and help in unexpected ways on their steamship journey. Their coy and almost wordless love affair – playful, ethereal and romantic in the deepest sense -- propels the film’s whirlwind of emotions. To play Salvatore, the wonderfully innocent and idealistic but driven hero who risks everything on his dreams of America, Emanuele Crialese turned to an intriguing artist with whom he had previously worked on ONCE WE WERE STRANGERS and RESPIRO. This was Vincenzo Amato, who, despite his matinee idol looks, is best known not as an actor but as an acclaimed New York-based sculptor and visual artist. While Amato’s usual artistic medium is steel, he sees both sculpting and acting as emerging from the same organic impulses. “Every day I go to the studio to work with my hands. Sometimes, when the project excites me, I work as an actor,” explains Amato. “I approach both challenges with the same attitude. They are different artistic expression and artists shouldn’t limit themselves to one thing.” It was Amato’s close relationship with Crialese – they met when both were awed and overwhelmed newcomers to America -- that convinced him to take on Salvatore’s epic odyssey. “We have a very beautiful artistic friendship,” he notes, “full of ideas, inspiration, fun and arguments. We discuss everything as a matter of life and death. That’s how I think he works with me differently than other actors – he can get really mad at me and at the same time he can be vulnerable because he can trust me.” Amato had first visited Ellis Island shortly after he himself first arrived in New York in the 1990s, and the impact of his visit had resonated ever since. “Having reached America on a plane, I felt the urge to see what the other way was like for all those people before me,” he comments. “Ellis Island is a haunted place; it’s easy to get emotional there.” Yet those very emotions, so close to his own experience, became key to his performance. “As an artist living in 21st Century New York trying to play a kind of man that doesn’t really exist anymore – I had to convince myself that there has always been something of Salvatore in me,” he observes. “So, I play Salvatore as if it was me moving to New York in 1910 instead of in 1993. Same person, different childhoods. Same beliefs, different opportunities. For him, I think, his journey is almost like going into a time machine, a chance for him to be born again in another era.” Amato found himself moved by just how brave a man like Salvatore must have been to walk away from the very narrow reality he knew, hanging all his hopes on nothing more than a mind-blowing postcard. He continues: “Salvatore has the rare courage to start his life all over again, to leap into the total unknown. Going to America had might as well have been going to the moon. A man such as Salvatore had to be curious, adventurous, and he was probably also a little scared, but not too much!” To more deeply understand Salvatore’s former life as a traditional Sicilian farmer, Amato traveled to Sicily and spent months there working on a farm himself. This rustic, backbreaking labor in the raw elements became the ultimate a way of preparing to embody Salvatore’s world before his epic journey. “I worked in Sicily with an old farmer named Liddo. He worked me hard and we spent long days together in the fields, under the scorching sun, in the rain, sometimes in the very cold and always on steep, stony ground,” Amato recalls. “During this time, he told me a lot of stories. Listening to him, I also developed the peculiar sound of Salvatore’s Sicilian dialect. All this work was also very good for my body language. I felt I had to work hard with my hands to earn the title of antico contadino – ancient peasant. I am immensely grateful to Emanuale Crialase for this chance to really experience this type of life.” Amato also had the chance in GOLDEN DOOR to experience something else remarkable – Salvatore’s unexpected and magical romance with the acclaimed actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, who plays the alluring Lucy, a woman who couldn’t be more different than Salvatore yet shares an almost mystical link to him that takes them both by surprise. Amato says of their uniquely passionate and unconventional relationship: “Salvatore is drawn to Lucy because he’s attracted by the unknown. It is a unusual movie romance because he doesn’t really expect anything from her -- because for them, on this journey, only the present can exist.” Gainsbourg, who is renowned internationally as both a popular recording star and versatile actress -- with roles ranging from Michel Gondry’s THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP to Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu’s 21 GRAMS to Franco Zefferelli’s JANE EYRE and a Cesar-winning performance in the French film LA BUCHE -- had in fact become interested in working Crialese after having seen Amato starring in RESPIRO. “I was seduced by RESPIRO and, when I met with Crialese, he had such an infectious enthusiasm,” Gainsbourg recalls. “Then, when I read the script for GOLDEN DOOR, I was even more enthralled. It came with such extraordinary visuals: magical images, beautiful faces, huge steamships. I didn’t hesitate for a moment.” Crialese felt that Gainsbourg -- who was born in London, raised in Paris and is the daughter of French writer/director/songwriter/actor Serge Gainsbourg and British actress Jane Birkin -- was a perfect match for Lucy’s intriguing aura, as well as her ability to turn heads and inspire rumors at every turn. He says of the character: “Salvatore calls it immediately – her name comes from the word for light! She represents light, hope and the New World. I chose Charlotte because on the one hand I adore her minimalist approach to characters, and on the other she has a certain discretion and reserve I thought was necessary for this role. I wanted her to be like a Giacometti statue, long and lean and very ethereal, moving like a sleepwalker through all these heavier, darker characters. She is like another image from one of Salvatore’s dreams – and when they meet, it is the Old World and the New coming together.” To prepare to play Lucy, Gainsbourg started in an unusual way – imagining her luxurious clothing. “The first step was the creation of the costumes, which took place in Rome,” she explains. “Emanuele asked my opinion and I thought it would be interesting if, in the beginning, she wore a very buttoned-up attire that would make her quite different from the other women and that, later on, she would become more naked and exposed. Then there was the choice of wig – that it would be auburn became emblematic of Lucy, again distinguishing her from everyone around her on board.” Nevertheless, Gainsbourg knew that her character, who spurs so many fanciful stories in the steerage dormitories, would always at bottom be enigmatic, even though she created several of her own intriguing back-stories for Lucy along the way. “During the shoot there remained at all times a mystery about Lucy. I began with the idea of her as a prostitute burdened with a troubled past. But I wasn’t very certain. Emanuele wanted that uncertainty,” she notes. “One day he told me, you could imagine something very different, that she came from high society but was thrown out by her husband. We continued inventing any number of credible biographies. Because, really, Lucy has a more symbolic function. She is the link between the Old World and the New. She incarnates modernity and all of its mysteries.” Lucy speaks both English and Italian, which posed additional challenges for the actress who is used to working in both French and English. “I studied Italian at school, but it seemed to me that was a long time ago and it wasn’t enough,” she says. “I thought I should work with a voice coach, but, at one of our first meetings, Emanuele had me read from an Italian newspaper and he said ‘Perfect! Don’t work on it.’ He would sometimes wait to tell me right before the scene if I was going to do it in English or Italian, which kept me off-guard!” The mystery of Lucy extends even to the outcome of the thrilling romance she sparks with Salvatore on the ship. Is it simply a moment passing in time, or something that will last as their new lives begin anew in New York? The natural chemistry the emerged between Gainsbourg and Amato, which builds to a fervent simmer, made the actress a believer in their fate together. “I knew from the start that Vincenzo and I would have a rather unusual love story,” she says. “It unfolds bit by bit – with the hide-and-seek in the air vents and the fog-shrouded arrival in New York. But I’m an optimist and I still imagine a real future for these two characters beyond Ellis Island.”
FROM RIVERS OF MILK TO RECREATING ELLIS ISLAND: THE PRODUCTION OF GOLDEN DOOR
GOLDEN DOOR might join a pantheon of films about American immigrants but it stands apart in its evocative visual style -- riding the line between the magically surreal and the harrowingly real, just as its characters ride the line between a world they know and one that occupies their wildest dreams. Even amidst the painstakingly recreated corridors of Ellis Island, Crialese inserts moments of playful ecstasy, setting the winding lines of haunted human faces to the transcendent sounds of Nina Simone, the rousing soul singer whose celebrations of hard-won freedom (“It’s a new day/It’s a new dawn/it’s a new life for me”) would be written decades later. The film’s evocative images were born in Crialese’s imagination and storyboarded prior to the production, then brought to life in Sicily and Buenos Aires, Argentina where Crialese’s team forged the story’s two key sets: the crowded steerage of an early 20th century steamship and the famed winding halls of Ellis Island. The director’s devoted research helped in carving out all the details -- from obtaining real turn-of-the-century photographs of humongous vegetables and giant farm animals to rebuilding the red brick structure of Ellis Island and its corral-like holding areas -- which make the experience of the film so rich. Yet, like most epic journeys, the production had its considerable challenges. “It was the most extreme filmmaking experiencing I’ve had, without any doubt,” says Charlotte Gainsbourg. “Emanuele has his own unique style, with a lot of improvisation, a lot of last-minute changes to scenes and dialogues. In Buenos Aires, we began with very physical rehearsals of scenes such as the storm on the ship, with the whole cast learning to move together, and fall, as if choreographed. Next, we shot the scenes inside the ship in chronological order, and then, finally, the scenes at Ellis Island.” Crialese recruited lauded French cinematographer Agnés Godard, best known for her work with Claire Denis, to shoot the film, utilizing an impressionistic style in which light is used sparingly, but always to magical effect. The pair divided the film into three visually distinct sections: the primal harshness of rocky, barren Sicily; the head-spinning claustrophobia of the ship’s steerage class; and the shock of arriving in New York – not to rivers of milk but to oceans of humanity, scrutiny, investigations and gripping dilemmas. The director also worked closely with costume designer Mariana Tufano to recreate the vast array of outfits needed to tell the story of Ellis Island. For the first part of the film, Tufano concentrated on the clothing with which real Italian peasants left for the New World – outfits that had once been frayed and torn but were patched and mended as best they could for the momentous journey. There was, of course, one exception: Lucy, whose clothes are modern, sophisticated and impeccable. Impeccable, but definitely not comfortable. “I haven’t worn a corset since JANE EYRE!” laughs Gainsbourg in regards to Tufano’s costumes. “And it wasn’t easy being squeezed into that girdle. I really envied the extras who didn’t have to wear them. But it was a way into the character, as if I was in someone else’s skin. It really focused me.” For the latter part of the film, with the arrival at Ellis Island, Tufano created an astonishingly wide array of garb, from Orthodox Greeks to Danish farmers to Cossacks still bearing swords, that represented every big challenge a costume designer can face – all at once – combining elements of period, lost ethnic cultures and the wear and tear of incredibly long and hard journeys. Her intensive research and work paid off in some of the film’s most memorable visuals, including Crialese’s astonishing parade of women’s head-coverings, as ladies from across the globe head off to meet their arranged husbands-to-be for the first time at Ellis Island. While the essence of authenticity in the costumes and sets was important to Crialese, his style truly comes to the fore in some of the film’s most surreal sequences, such as the fantasy bath Salvatore and Lucy take in a river of milk while floating on an over-sized carrot raft. The film is book-ended by contrasting, mythological images; opening with shots of a barefoot Salvatore scrambling up rocky Sicilian cliffs his mouth filled with stones in penitence; and concluding with a mass of swimmers making their way up a river of milk to an unseen destination. Yet there is one astonishing image in GOLDEN DOOR that remains among the director’s favorites and perhaps the film’s most emblematic – that of the giant steamship leaving for America, shot from above as it cleaves away from the Italian shore, where it once hugged the land, carving a sudden, palpably vast space between those left behind and those heading into the great unknown. “It was one of the first ideas that came to me for GOLDEN DOOR, this image of the people who are leaving while others stay,” says the director. “I truly wanted to represent this exhilarating moment of abandoning one life to be reborn in another.” # # # #