Now open to the capitalist West, the country is rife for plunder. Enter two Yuppie Italian seam artists, Fiore (Michele Placido) and his younger partner, Gino (Enrico Lo Verso), who need to find an Albanian straw man to sit as “chairman” of their phony shoe factory, for which they hope to get Italian government grants. In the hellish remains of one of Hoxha’s prison camps they find their perfect sap–a feeble-minded 70-year-old named Spiro (Carmelo Di Mazzarelli). They clean him up, coach him to sign documents and install him in a Catholic orphanage.

“Lamerica” has more on its mind than exposing the dark side of the new world order. Spiro slips away from the orphanage, and the frantic Gino sets off in pursuit. So begins an odyssey across the bunker-strewn, beggar-infested landscape of Albania–where feral children steal the shoes from your feet. During his journey Gino discovers that the man he’s searching for isn’t who he seems. He’s not even Albanian. Nor will Gino’s identity survive intact. His precious Jeep stripped, his documents confiscated, he’s caught up in a nightmare that forces him to acknowledge his kinship with the desperately poor Albanians dreaming of escape to the promised land of Italy. And, in a moving, transcendent climax, we see as well Gino’s kinship with his Sicilian forefathers, who once dreamed of making the voyage to a magical America.

Amelio, who made the stunning “Stolen Children,” is a master. His haunting images have a stately elegance that put one in mind of both John Ford and Bernardo Bertolucci. But he also has roots in neorealism: except for Lo Verso and Placido, his cast is composed entirely of nonprofessionals. From the 80-year-old Di Mazzarelli, a former fisherman, he coaxes a performance of remarkable poignance. His traumatized Spiro, who’s spent 50 years as a prisoner and still thinks he’s a 20-year-old in World War II, and the callow, opportunistic Gino develop a strange bond. It’s built on deceit but evolves into something more complex–a shared yearning that links the Italian past to the Italian present. Amelio’s eloquent but unsentimental humanism asks us to reconsider our relationship to the wretched of the earth. Though his film, which won the Felix Award as the best European Film of 1994, will obviously have a special resonance for Italians, it’s no less relevant to America in 1996, in the grips of anti-immigrant fever. Don’t miss this beauty of a film.