Becoming a Filmmaker, an Adult, and an Italian?: Shooting the New Italian Youth and Their Rites/Rights of Passage

Over the past few years, second generations in Italy have started to appropriate the cinematic tool as a creative entry point to narrate their professional, generational, and political life transitions, giving scholars the reason to think of their work as an expression of an emerging collective subjectivity, the “new Italian youth”. Such a label frequently identifies Italy-born children of immigrants—and young people who settled in the country after birth—as nationals, despite the obstacles concerning the acquisition of citizenship. Focusing specifically on the cinematic autobiographic production of Laura Halilovic, an Italian-Bosnian girl of Romani ethnicity, the aspirations, expectations, and concerns of a “new Italian” cinemaker are discussed in relation to three rites/rights of passage (becoming a filmmaker, becoming an adult, and becoming an Italian) and through the performative agencies of threshold spaces and objects.