“FROM Italy with passion” is this year’s slogan for the Italian Film Festival; an apt tag for a festival opening with a biopic about a Calabrian-Belgian crooner and ending with Sophia Loren in “Marriage Italian Style”.

When I talk to 76-year-old singer, composer, accordionist and grandfather Rocco Granata by phone to Antwerp, I’m already humming his most famous song, which goes “Marina, Marina, Marina” and has been covered by Dean Martin, Louis Armstrong and most recently, André Rieu.

Festival opener “Marina” is based on Granata’s autobiography and stars heart-throb Matteo Simoni.

During 1948 in a Calabrian village, young Rocco sees his father leave for the mines in Belgium to support his family. It’s a classic emigration story, with the family following and being treated unkindly by some Belgians who  stereotyped Italians as a lower form of life.

“Marina,” he says, is very up to date “because now there is a new problem with all the people coming to Europe from Africa… it is exactly the same as if it was 50 or 60 years ago and it’s like being an African American now”.

But music, talent and love triumph in this feel-good film.

“I started to learn music in Italy when I was six years old and papa paid for that,” Granata says.

“When we followed him to Belgium and I bought an accordion and papa saw that I wanted to make music my life, he was not happy.

“But strong water goes to the sea, so I played and I played and I played.”

Most of the film is true, but two scenes worry Granata – one where he and his Belgian girlfriend bathe nude and another in which he is unjustly accused of raping her.

He says: “Italian boys, we like women, but we respect women, so when the director told me what he wanted, I told him: ‘I don’t like it, don’t do it’… but he said young people today expect that kind of thing.”

Granata’s been a star since 1959 when he sold a million records in Germany.

“Thank God,” he says, “or thank Buddha, or thank Jehovah or thank Allah… that guy up there was on my side.”

He’s been heaped with national honours in Belgium, performed in Carnegie Hall and travelled everywhere, even to Brisbane. He’s off to Rome and is preparing a new album. Best of all, the film is being shown to Belgian school kids, the grandchildren of those mine workers.

And did he eventually make his father Salvatore proud of him? Well, yes, he says, “but with Italian fathers, you won’t hear it from their mouths, you have to look an Italian father in the eyes to know.”

Italian Film Festival, Palace Electric Cinemas, September 23-October 15. Bookings to palacecinemas.com.au/cinemas/electric/ or 6222 4900.