Friday, 31st January 2024, Giuseppe Schillaci’s feature-length documentary received the prestigious Grand Prix of the National Competition at the Fipadoc in Biarritz, one of Europe’s most important creative documentary festivals.
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.