Shun Li is a barmaid at small working men’s cafe in a sleepy lagoon town just north of Venice.  Her job is the price that she must pay for being able to leave China for which she is totally beholden to her shady Chinese employers,  and once they decide her debt is paid they will bring over her small son that she had to leave back home.

One of her regular customers is Bepi, an old fisherman who had immigrated from Yugoslavia many years,  and was now a recent widower. Known to sprout rhyming verse to his chums, his nickname in the Bar is ‘the Poet’.   He took a shine to the shy young Chinese girl who seemed like a exotic addition to their wee traditional Italian community.

When their innocent friendship became fuel for gossip, the other men in the Bar teased Bepi relentlessly, but Shun Li’s employers forbade her to continue as they wanted to maintain a low profile in the town. They threatened her with a move to another city and another job where she would have to start paying off her debt all over again.

This quiet and understated drama directed and co-written by Andrea Segre with its sparse dialogue allows the settings of the Lagoons to rightly take center place. The stoic way all the locals just carry on regardless when the city floods and they sit knee deep in water in the cafe just as normal sipping their Grapa is wonderfully bizarre.

The relationship between these two totally different immigrants evolves through loneliness and a need for a close friendship that respects self-imposed limits as neither of them want it to be anything less than pure.  When Shun-Li is forced to stop communicating with Bepi it comes at a heavy price, strangely enough more for him than her.

All at a gentle pace in the most beautiful of settings, this is a quiet wee gem of a movie.

Available now on DVD

★★★★★★★