Big Wood (2024)

 

Sergione, a fifty-year-old tattoo artist weighing 260 kg, has lived all his life in the working-class Palermo district of Bosco Grande. He was one of the city’s legendary punks, rebelling against the mafia culture of the 1980s. Thirty years later, he’s still sitting outside his mother’s house, doing drugs and partying with his street friends. Every time Giuseppe Schillaci returns to his hometown, he goes and listen to his tragicomic anecdotes and longings for escape. As the seasons go by, he watches Sergio deteriorate. In mortal danger, Sergio goes to a specialized center for super-obese people, from which he flees a month later. Back in Bosco Grande, true to his punk mantra: “Live fast, die young,” he once again gets bogged down in the morbid spiral of his addictions. 

Documentary.

Durata: 77 minutes

© Wendigo Films – Drole de Trame – France Télévisions

 

 

World Premiere at Giornate degli Autori, Venise Festival,  september 2024.

https://www.giornatedegliautori.com/program/bosco-grande/

 

Prix Best Film at Salina Doc Fest (15 september 2024)

https://www.salinadocfest.it/premio-palumbo-miglior-documentario-a-bosco-grande-di-giuseppe-schillaci/

Jury formed by director Firouzeh Khosrovani, producer Andrea Occhipinti and director and actress Kasia Smutniak. Reasons for the award: ‘A documentary that recounts 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’.

 

Screening Da Venezia a Roma, Cinema Farnese, 25 September 2024 h 21.

 

Festival Efebo d’Oro, Palermo, 11 november 2024 h 20.30.

 

 

Director’s Notes

 

“For me, 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.”

 

 

 

 

 

• https://close-up.info/bosco-grande-di-giuseppe-schillaci-giornate-degli-autori-notti-veneziane/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFo4ZtleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHQ_phgNIu53toXvHUWcuSq19FRBW2qH9zE0zAd5xqzeZVvAnGnWvbGtdMw_aem_eY1kGZWRGCdzbHOnTk02cA

 

• https://lumiereeisuoifratelli.com/2024/09/22/bosco-grande/

 

Tags: documentary fabio sgroi jackie and his loaders mafia obesità palermo punk sergione sicilia sicily