Il Postino

Michael Radford's Il Postino opened in 1995 and won the Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score (Luis Bacalov). The film received four further Oscar nominations including Best Picture (making it one of the few non-English-language films ever to receive the Best Picture nomination at that point) and was widely received as a small international cinema event. Radford, an English director, had taken over the production after the original director (Massimo Troisi) had decided he could not handle direction alongside the central role.

On the small Italian island of Salina off the coast of Sicily (fictionalised in the film as the unnamed island where the exiled Chilean poet Pablo Neruda spent a year of his real-life mid-1950s exile) a shy and largely unschooled local fisherman's son named Mario Ruoppolo (Massimo Troisi) is hired by the island postal service to deliver letters to a single client: Neruda himself (Philippe Noiret). The film follows Mario's slow encounter with Neruda's poetry, with metaphor as a literary device, and with his own attempt to court the local cafe-server Beatrice (Maria Grazia Cucinotta).

The film became internationally consequential partly for the conditions of its production. Massimo Troisi, the much-loved Neapolitan comic actor and writer, had been ill with a heart condition during the production and died of a heart attack the day after filming wrapped, at age forty-one. The Best Actor Oscar nomination was awarded posthumously. The film's continuing emotional weight in international cinema-history is partly tied to those circumstances.