CIAJ ROCCHI, MATTEO DEMONTE

ITALY | 2017 | 22'

Chinamen is a large multimedia project that tells the history of the Chinese community in Milan and in Italy. As a result of its unique research, Chinamen is both a graphic novel and an animated documentary and tells the story of a century of Chinese immigration in our country: from the first merchants who came to Milan for the Universal Exhibition in 1906 to the birth of the Chinese community in Milan and Bologna, through the difficulties encountered by Chinese interns in the concentration camps during Fascism, and the extraordinary events of the great entrepreneurs of the 1960s and 1970s. With Chinamen, Ciaj Rocchi and Matteo Demonte paint the fresco of a still unknown and yet multiethnic Novecento, a microcosm of Chinese men and women who have known not only to love and understand, but also to transform their ordinary lives into formidable stories of integration and success.

Ciaj Rocchi (Milan 1976) and Matteo Demonte (Milan 1973) are video-makers and comic book authors. By Becco Giallo Editore they published the graphic novels Primavere  and Autunni  and Chinamen, a century of Chinese in Milan which is also a documentary with animated drawings, made in co-production with the Mudec, Museo delle Culture. Since 2015, they are illustrators for La Lettura and Corriere della Sera.