Giallo a Milano
2009 · 7m · Italy
Directed by Sergio Basso
Genres: animation, documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
An animated ballad about the Chinese community in Milan, narrated by Longxing, a police informer, tracing his journey from China to Milan where he witnesses a bloodshed and meets a policeman.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a grimy live-action crime story when you say 'Milan,' but Basso flips the whole genre by animating an informer's ballad—it's formally weird enough to work, though the mythic tone sometimes softens the edge I want from a subversive premise.
A film that knows exactly what it is: a lyric documentary rendered in animation, situating itself in both the Italian giallo tradition and the Chinese diaspora narrative, with every formal choice—the narration, the palette, the editing rhythm—building toward something formally cohesive and historically conscious.
The decision to let Longxing's voice carry the entire weight of intimate testimony while the animation abstracts around it transforms what could be a straightforward migration story into something that trusts restraint—one persona, one perspective, everything else rendering itself in color and movement.
Reviews
It deals with a subject usually at risk of trivialization and rhetoric in an admirable way; its animation technique, its direction and its narration make it, on the contrary, a wonderful document, which depicts a cross section of a reality often taken for granted.