Many things tempt us to America. The potential to soar from rags to riches thanks to that can-do attitude. How about the disturbingly ultra-white dental health care? The artistic canon of Cuba Gooding Jr.

What attracts Salvatore (Amato) - a peasant farmer barely scraping a living on the windswept mountains of Sicily - is a sepia-toned photo of an onion as big as a barrage balloon.

Profoundly superstitious and totally illiterate, he is seduced by this vision of what the New World has to offer…as well as canoe-sized carrots, trees sagging with cash and rivers flowing with milk.

Making a momentous decision to sell off his land, his home and his livestock, Salvatore embarks for America with his two sons (one a deaf mute), daughters (locked into arranged marriages) and mouthy old crone of a mother.

During the confusing maelstrom of opportunists and corrupt officialdom that is the boarding process, he chances upon Lucy (Gainsbourg), a mysterious Englishwoman totally out of place among the heaving mass of Italian yokels.

They are all making the four-week voyage in steerage, the dank bowels of the ship, and the berth of Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic (but without the Oirish reels and rags designed by Hugo Boss. )

Here women and men are segregated and forced to bunk down cheek-by-jowl in iron cots as the rusting hulk rolls and pitches as it makes slow progress towards New York and an uncertain future.

During their daily opportunities to take air on deck, Salvatore, a widower, finds himself drawn to the coquettish Lucy...yet her female travelling companions are only too aware of the reasons for her "sleepwalking" absences in the night.

Shot on a modest budget, it's miraculous how director Emanuele Crialese conveys via splendid sound effects and ingenious camerawork the immigrant ordeal.

There's the ship-borne squalor alleviated by blind hope, experienced by immigrants who have given up everything for a land dreamed of...but never seen.

In one key scene, fancy-dan CGI is made redundant when Salvatore climbs up a frosted window in the "Isle of Sighs" to describe the soaring skyscrapers of New York to his fellow travellers.

The subtle relationship between Salvatore - a decent, humane man, and Lucy, essentially a classy gold-digger - is handled with tact and their pact acted out on Ellis Island is delivered with a delicate poignancy.

While acknowledging the opportunities provided by America, Crialese never ducks the most unsavoury aspects of the immigrant ordeal: for instance, the belief that lack of intelligence was contagious and therefore grounds for refusing entry.

It's a moving, compassionate saga, beautifully played by its multi-national cast, and a timely reminder of a time when America didn't regard everyone beyond its shores with suspicion.

Tim Evans