
No dogs or Italians allowed
No Dogs or Italians Allowed is a heart-warming, magical stop-motion film about the Italian grandparents of filmmaker Alain Ughetto, who through feast and famine struggled their way out of poverty to find happiness and prosperity in France. On top of a mountain in the iddle of the Piemontese Alps in Northern Italy is the tiny village of Ugheterra. Nowadays all its houses are ramshackle, but a century ago families, all with the same surname, eked out an existence. Likewise, the grandparents of director Alain Ughetto.
With humour and warmth, via his grandmother Cesira, he relates the saga of his family. Cesira ends up in the mountains through her love for Luigi, one of the 11 children in an Ughetto family. Land is scarce, as too is the food. Every winter, Luigi and his brothers migrate to France and Switzerland, to carry out heavy labouring work. Children are born, new relationships forged, houses built and all the time, dreams of a better existence.
Using a whimsical stop-motion animation style, in which the director quite literally makes contact with his grandmother, Ughetto has created a brilliant, moving love-letter to his parents and his grandparents. Their whole lives they worked with their hands and could make anything they were able to see. Here too, the creator of this film brings everyone and everything to life with his hands, from the cardboard houses and the forests of broccoli to the cows and his own family.
No Dogs or Italians Allowed is an ode to a time that has almost long been forgotten. A world in which many Europeans were poor and illiterate and worked as migrant workers to make ends meet.