In August 1991, Vlora, an old merchant vessel coming from Albania, docks in Bari and the sea of humans that travelled on it begin to cry: 'Italy, Italy!' An impressive documentary that recounts, through extraordinary found footage, the most significant landing of Albanians on the Italian coast in history. The Vlora’s journey to Italy, with twenty thousand Albanians and their cargo of hope, was also the country’s first mass rejection.
»In 1991 I was 24. I remember the arrival of the Vlora as a sort of media cataclysm. That disembarkment signalled the start of a socio-cultural revolution that until then had been unimaginable. In this sense La nave dolce is a film that imposed itself on me and forced me to go beyond the three-act narrative scheme, borrowing wider structures from tragedy and classical literature.« (Daniele Vicari)