Sergione, a 50-year-old tattoo artist weighing 260 kilos, has lived his whole life in the working-class Bosco Grande district of Palermo. He was one of the city’s legendary punks, rebelling against the bourgeois and mafia culture of the 1980s. Thirty years on, Sergio is still there, sitting outside his mother’s house, drinking and joking with his friends from the neighbourhood. Every time director Giuseppe Schillaci returns to his home town, he listens to his tragicomic anecdotes and dreams of a different life, outside the prison he has built for himself. But as the seasons go by, his health deteriorates. To save his life, Sergio has to go to a special centre for obese people, from which he escapes a month later. Back in Bosco Grande, true to his punk mantra of ‘live fast – die young’, he spirals downwards into addiction.
77-minutes, creative documentary
© Wendigo Films – Drole de Trame – France Télévisions
World Premiere at the Giornate degli Autori of the Venice Film Festival, September 2024.
https://www.giornatedegliautori.com/program/bosco-grande/
Palumbo Award as Best Film at the Salina Doc Fest, 16 September 2024.
Jury formed by director Firouzeh Khosrovani, producer Andrea Occhipinti and director and actress Kasia Smutniak.
Reason for the award:
‘A documentary that tells with affection and irony the profound pain of an anomalous protagonist of Palermo’s punk scene of the 1980s, the failings, excesses and life of Sergione, a 250-pound man who never left his Bosco Grande neighbourhood. A poignant story masterfully told by Giuseppe Schillaci, who has managed to create a great tale that moves, makes us reflect and leaves its mark. The cinema we like’.
From Venise to Rome, Cinema Farnese, 25 September 2024 h 21.
Festival Efebo d’Oro, Palermo, 11 November 2024 h 20.30.
https://www.efebodoro.it/portfolio/bosco-grande/
TRACES DE VIE, Clermont-Ferrand, in competition in the Un Monde Sensible section, 4 December 2024 at 21.
RIDF, Rome International Documentary Festival, in competition in the ITA DOC section, 8 December 2024 at 19.30.
ZALAB AWARD for VOD distribution.
Reason for the award:
‘A black fairy tale, a sorrowful portrait of a man and at the same time of an era and a city that are prisoners of a past time that never seems to pass. We award the prize for broadcasting on Zalab View to Bosco Grande by Giuseppe Schillaci, for the surgical and poetic mastery with which he gives us a very particular story that effectively manages to be universal’.
https://www.ridf.it/i-film-vincitori-del-ridf-2024/
FIPADOC Festival International Documentaire, Biarritz Selection in the festival competition: screenings on 24 January 2025 at 20:00, Salle Le Royal and on 28 January 2025 at 20:00 at Cinema Le Colisée.
https://fipadoc.com/fr/film/11626
Grand-Prix of National Competition at FIPADOC in Biarritz.
Reason for the award:
‘The images freeze instantly in your skull: a gigantic body, immobilised on a bed in a tiny room that it takes up almost all the space in; a trap door that opens onto a pulley system used to lower a pizza that collapses on the floor; a grey-white cat looking for its master between the empty beer bottles. These are images that provoke in the viewer a complicated mixture of comedy and despair, love and disgust, the kind of unprecedented images we’ve come to expect from cinema. For months, Giuseppe Schillaci filmed his friend Sergio, a tattoo artist and pillar of a community of former Palermo punkers, more or less damaged by life, whose lives remain united. A huge man in every respect, with his 250 kilos and his unconditional love for his friends and his ambivalent mother. The film shows the neighbourhood of Bosco Grande from a pavement level, with a deliberately myopic viewpoint, which gives it a particularly accurate portrayal of the social and cultural margins’.
Director’s note
“Making a documentary about Sergio is a way of delving into my own Sicilian education, a folk culture brimming with irony, passion, and humanity. The camera I lovingly turn on Sergio reveals my own identity as well, like a mirror image, and the wounds inflicted by a certain violent, Mafia mentality. Sergio is an eternal punk from the 1980s, grappling with a world addicted to money and power. His enormous, motionless body is emblematic of his desperate revolt against atavic, patriarchal values. Bosco Grande is the culmination of a reflection I began on my native Palermo in my novels and previous documentaries. The film pays homage to the vibrant, restless soul of this place I love and hate so viscerally; it’s a tribute to its people, but above all to Sergio, my ‘double’, in a sense, but one who never left home: ‘a character in search of an author’ who stayed in Bosco Grande and locked himself into his role until the end.”
DOP
Federico Cammarata
Eugenio De Rosa
editor
Felice d‘Agostino
original music
Gianluca Cangemi
sound
Mirko Cangiamila
with
Sergio Spatola
Clotilde Gaglio
Daniela Spatola
Maria Sardina
Luisa Sardina
Fabio Sgroi
Fabrizio Puleo
Dottore Maurizio Renda
Dottore Giuseppe Rotondo
Billo Svergognino
producer
Alexis Taillant
productions
France Télévisions
Wendigo Films
co-productions
Drôle de trame
Malfé Film
Chiara Zanini ufficio.stampa.zanini@gmail.
- Rockerilla, interview “Il punk come scusa per indagare l’intimo” de Mirco Salvadori sur le numero d’octobre 2024.
- Interview with Enrico Magrelli on the show: Hollywood Party, Rai Radio 3.
- Interview with Eliana Escheri a Auditorium, Rai Radio 1.
- https://www.mobmagazine.it/sergione-col-documentario-bosco-grande-alla-mostra-del-cinema-di-venezia/