Later, these young men were joined by deportees from the United States and Canada and by some older men from the neighborhood, aspiring-rap-musician types.
Mrs Arroyo has visited some of the returning Filipinos and said in her weekly radio address she had seen "first-hand the sufferings of thousands of deportees from Sabah".
As Mr Benigni and his screenwriter, Vincenzo Cerami, got down to the script, they asked advice of the association of Italian deportees, mostly Jews who had survived the camps.