Showcase Cinema had a good run four summers ago with director Frank Ciota and brother/writer Joe's gritty neighborhood portrait North End. So much so that their next Indie feature, Ciao America, is trying to grab a similar success. Joe's script is based on his experiences as the first American to coach U.S.-style football for an Italian team. Filmed mostly in Italy, the charming little film tucks in a roots search and thereby accomplishes more than the storyline about a summer romance abroad would on its own.

Visiting American Lorenzo Primavera (Eddie Malavarca) helps shape a team that can boot a lopsided pigskin like a hacky-sack but for whom the aerodynamics of throwing a spiral is as baffling as rocket science. The amiable Italians he gets to know makes Ciao America about his love affair with the country as well as with a student he meets and falls for, the beautiful Paola (Violante Placido).

The script has enough strengths to have attracted some readily recognizable names to its acting opportunities. Giancarlo Giannini plays an uncle Lorenzo seeks out to learn why his namesake grandfather left his country and family -- the family secret kept by Lorenzo's angry father turns out to be complex and human more than melodramatic. Paul Sorvino is the take-charge father who flies over to his incommunicado law-school-bound son. Those who have seen Michael Corrente's Rhode Island-set Federal Hill will recognize its romantic lead, Anthony DeSando, playing Lorenzo's American immigrant cousin, who has married and moved to Ferarra for good.

Hollywoodish manipulations do creep in -- Lorenzo's mysteriously expatriated grandfather leaves him an open-ended plane ticket and promptly dies -- but a nostalgic voice-over by the grandfather weaves in a parallel story and gives emotional heft to the lovers' conflict of who will give up their homeland. (100 minutes) At the Showcase (Warwick and Seekonk Route 6 only).