Milan, Italy

How does a subculture shift between continents and create ethnic communities?

One might notice them meeting up in the center of Milan, right in front of the Duomo or gathering around a table at McDonald's or Burger King. Dressed in skater clothes and perfectly following the latest american fashion, the young Filipinos spend their time between these globalization shrines and the churches, where their communities gather to listen to a mass spoken in tagalog, mixed with some English. The Filipinos in Milan are some 30,000, the biggest ethnic minority in town, very tight as a group and, averagely, by far more religious than the Italians they live amongst. Although more and more organized, the Filipinos haven't really integrated much, both because of their strong connections to their homeland, where they send money and dream to return to, and because of other difficulties like language barrier and impossibility to take advantage or their learning degrees – without mentioning local racism.

While it's true the Filipino culture is totally different than the Italian one, you can tell the United States have shaped it a lot more and directly from their homeland, which they ruled up to 1946. For example, the Filipino Pinoy Rap was the first asian hip-hop-related phenomenon to develop into a local scene, since the early 80s. Today you can still tell hip-hop has a strong influence on young Filipinos in Milan, but although their meeting spots are mostly located in the very city center - just like some key locations for the local break dance scene, such as the Muretto in C.so Vittorio Emanuele and the P.ta Venezia metro station – it's not clear whether they're networking with Italian breakers, creating a scene on their own, or neither.

Mission Report

Our shooting was made in Milan on July 30th: it’s focused on the urban areas involving the breakdance phenomenon and the groups of young Filipinos who practice this discipline.
Here are the places we shot: the mezzanine of the Porta Venezia underground station, the “muretto” (“little wall”) in Largo Corsia dei Servi, Piazza Mercanti and the McDonald's in Piazza Cordusio’s.
The footage shows these places at different times of the day, to better appreciate their different features, both spatial and functional.
The people we interviewed confirmed us the importance of these areas, and they suggested us to visit some other interesting urban sceneries, like, for example, Piazza Mercanti.
One of the first sequences of the shooting, which in our opinion could open the documentary, portrays an area close to Piazza Loreto, which has been (and actually still is) one of the places in the city most loved by local writers, and also a neighborhood with a strong percentage of Filipino inhabitants.
We realized just a few interviews with young Filipinos, we had some difficulties recording them because they often didn’t want to be filmed.
Generally we didn’t notice a close relationship between the ways the Filipino youth gathers and the hip-hop subculture, in fact a lot of guys strongly underlined they actually dance in the street, but they don’t breakdance. Furthermore, none of the breakers we met at the “muretto” were Filipinos.
Probably, the interview with Chiara Lainati would have made the mission easier.
Fabio Zinna, Elena Fontanella