Music and migration: Transgenerational crossovers in La vera leggenda di Tony Vilar and Di madre in figlia

In this article I discuss Giuseppe Gagliardi’s La vera leggenda di Tony Vilar/The True Legend of Tony Vilar (2006) and Andrea Zambelli’s Di madre in figlia/ From Mother to Daughter (2008) as crossover and transnational documentaries engaging with both internal and international histories of Italian migration that also illuminate Italy’s current postcolonial condition. I claim that both films encourage a reflection on the ability of music and film to travel across national boundaries, engender cultural collaborations and contaminations, and create meaning and identification for different communities and generations. The directors’ and protagonists’ deliberate emphasis on performance and performativity in the construction of the characters on and off stage and the numerous self-reflexive and meta-cinematic elements of the two films, from mockumentary to found footage, disrupt the perceived objective truths often assigned to documentary and point towards more productive ways of representing and interpreting reality.