Iranian-born, Italy-based writer-director Milad Tangshir explores the life of a fellow displaced immigrant with cool-headed detachment and unsentimental empathy in Anywhere Anytime. Featuring a mostly non-professional cast, this handsomely shot contemporary drama concerns a desperately poor young man who earns a meagre living as bicycle courier in the city of Turin, only for his life to spiral into tragedy when his bike is stolen. Following its well-received world premiere in Venice and Toronto, Tangshir’s impressively confident first feature made its African debut last week as part of the official selection at Cairo International Film Festival.
Any resemblance between Anywhere Anytime and previous Italian film classics is wholly intentional, because Tangshir is paying overt and knowing homage here to Vittorio De Sica’s beloved neorealist milestone Bicycle Thieves (1948), which also featured an impoverished anti-hero searching for his stolen bicycle in the harsh economic landscape of post-World War II Rome. But this is not a remake, nor even a reverential homage, more like a fruitful dialogue between the two films filtered through a 21st century lens. While the plot contains many echoes of De Sica, the socio-political context and final act are both very different. We might even call this neo-neorealism.
The protagonist here is Issa (Ibrahima Sambou), an undocumented Senegalese immigrant working as a fast-food courier in Turin, part of the huge pedal-powered shadow workforce that has become a striking feature of the new “gig economy” in every city across the world over the last decade. Fluent in Italian after six years in Italy, Issa lives in austere dormitory accommodation provided by a charity, alongside other exiles, refugees and economic migrants. Among his small circle of Senegalese friends is aspiring singer Awa (the splendidly named Success Edemakhiota), with whom he shares a sweetly flirtatious chemistry, and the kindly Mario (Moussa Dicko Diango), who plays a kind of big brother role to Issa.
When Issa finds it increasingly hard to find steady work due to his illegal status, Mario proves to be his saviour by offering to share his occasional job as a bicycle courier for a food delivery company called Anywhere Anytime. This means Issa will have to impersonate his friend, but as Mario assures him, their mostly white Italian customers will treat two semi-invisible black menial workers as interchangeable. And so it proves, with Issa successfully impersonating Mario as he zips around the city delivering fast food.
But this hopeful plan soon turns to disaster when a stranger steals Issa’s bike in the middle of a delivery. Unable to call the police due to his illegal status, and too poor to replace the second-hand bicycle he could barely afford the first time, he spends a fraught weekend desperately searching for his bike and the thief who took it. His frantic urban odyssey brings him into contact with a colourful cast of characters, from a kindly Christian grandmother to knife-wielding racist thugs who threaten him with lethal violence and racial slurs. These men are repulsive, but Tangshir makes sure to show us their slum residence, a bleak situation almost as hopeless and marginalised as Issa’s. The tragedy at the heart of this film is the poor stealing from the poor.
The amateur cast are well chosen. Sambou is a handsome and engaging screen presence, and Tangshir takes pains not to paint Issa as a saintly victim, Even so, he still comes across as a little too sweet and bland. In the film’s closing act, he is finally driven to crime himself, triggering a series of terrible consequences. But this sudden escalation feels too rushed to make the emotional impact it should, and Anywhere Anytime leaves a few too many threads dangling. More dimension to both plot and character might have elevated this solidly crafted social drama from good to great.
On an aesthetic level, Anywhere Anytime is fairly conventional but pleasingly polished. With a bright colour palette and generous use of free-flowing tracking shots, Tangshir and his cinematographer Giuseppe Maio give most scenes a crisp, colourful, sun-bronzed look that makes even the most grungy corners of Turin appear deceptively idyllic. Another key pleasure is a prominently deployed soundtrack of vintage Afro-Cuban jazz, mostly from the late 1960s and 1970s, chosen by the director partly because it captures Africa’s post-colonial boom period of growing cultural confidence. The legendary godfather of Ethopian jazz, Mulatu Atstatke, features among this richly flavoured mixtape.
Director: Milad Tangshir
Screenwriters: Giaime Alonge, Daniele Gaglianone, Milad Tangshir
Cast: Ibrahima Sambou, Moussa Dicko Diango, Success Edemakhiota
Cinematography: Giuseppe Maio
Editing: Enrico Giocannone
Producer: Marta Donzelli, Gregorio Paonessa, Carla Altieri, Roberto De Paolis
Peoduiction companies: Vivo Film (Italy), Young Films (Italy), Rai Cinema (Italy)
World sales: Fandango
Venue: Cairo International Film Festival (Official Selection Out of Competition)
In Italian, Wolof
82 minutes
