Just arrived yesterday to charming Taormina, aptly named because it’s perched royally on mount Tauro overlooking mount Etna. The town is not packed as I was initially afraid of but contains a healthy dose of tourists that happily savor the holy trinity: pasta-espresso-ice cream.

I decided to kick off the festival with the short films contest sponsored by New Italian Cinema Events (N.I.C.E), showcasing Sicilian cinema as an optimal way to get the local cultural sensibilities.

Here are some of my favorites, which illustrates that a rich story can easily be captured under 12 minutes:

Sunnyside (Ivano Fachin – 6′)
The film, shot in black and white depicts the grim daily grind of a corporate rat in… Manhattan (!?). I was hoping to see the Sicilian version… regardless the film is able to bring about a sense of daily work routine by using repetitive activities of the actor; drinking coffee, typing away in his office etc. with no heard dialogs – only intimate guitar soundtrack that shares space with the sounds of the big city. When the protagonist decides one day to wear a red clown nose firing smiles wherever he goes the people seem initially not to respond. It’s only when he gives up on this “be happy” strategy that reality changes but without him noticing. Think about it the next time you wait for an email reply that hasn’t arrived just yet. It’s just that people have other agendas and most likely it is not personal.

The Tomato – Il Pomodoro (Alessio Angelico – 9′)
If the previous film dealt with the grim side of life, this film literally lit up the screening room due to its comic and clever screenplay. Using a tried-and-true plot strategy of marrying unlikely combinations: a tomato falls out of the grocery bag of a light switch salesman, a seemingly trivial event, gets mushroomed into a Kafkian tail of bureaucratic nightmare. The poor guy needs to fill out official applications to remove the tomato from his doorstep as if it’s a public hazard. Inspectors are coming and measuring the shriveling tomato that by the day loses its original maturity when dropped, thus creating a vicious cycle of comic parody. I liked the choice of the tomato, as the object of contention, that on one hand puts the film on a sci-fi mode of an Italian society that like the sacred cows of India – evolved into complete veneration of the tomato with dead serious processes and at the same time the immense ridicule seeing it though realistic eyes.

Rec Stop Play (Emanuele Pisano – 11′)
The film weaves together 4 stories: a father tending to his comatose child, a prisoner on parole receiving love letters from a customer in a launderette where she works, a casual dialog of two passersby and a common thread of a guy that records all these dialogs only to play them back to a puppet in his garden. The message at the end of the film states: “communication conquers all barriers.” I saw a different Pirandellian message: what you see is never what it seems. Especially since the plotline uses brief shots to conjure specific assumptions and then reveal the opposite intent.

Self-Portrait – Autoritratto (Antonio Emanuele – 8′)
A frustrated painter is experiencing a radical case of creative bloc to the point his girlfriend leaves him and he’s left alone with a blank canvas that is mockingly staring at him in his shabby apartment. The photography and the facial expressions of the struggling actor that tries variety of tactics to compel the canvas into obedience – turns the canvas into a relentless adversary. It sure made me think about how hard sometimes the first stroke could be, carrying this imaginary heavy weight of self-criticism, where in fact all you need is really to take the plunge and let your first idea lead you to the second, third and Nth ideas that typically just hide under that blank page. Ideas are like a social network in your brain and can easily get viral, you just need to post the first comment…

Great excitement for this movie which is again from and about Sardinia. The fact that the director was there presenting the film and holding the discussion makes it even more interesting.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sonetaula is a book by Giuseppe Fiori that he recently re-wrote and shortened. It is set up in a decade between 1938 and 1948 (more or less) in the island of Sardinia, inland, in the shepherd’s most true world.

Sonetaula is the name of our character, in reality a nick name, which means sound of wood, since he was very skinny.

Sonetaula follows the story of many other children in a typical village of Sardinia. He has to help the father to tend his flock, because he has to go to work in a factory in Italy, he would make more money, he said. Poor people, after war, hoping to have a chance to change their lives. However, we will discover that this is not the truth.

Sonetaula is a young boy victim of his culture. In the mountain, in the cold, in the freezing solitude of woods and sheep, one day, founding out that his friends stole one of his sheep he goes and kills 20 of theirs.

It’s a revenge imposed by the shepherd culture, where you have to protect what is yours at all costs and teach others that you are stronger.

This act will mark his life and his future won’t have chances for salvation, unfortunately. Rejected now by a people that is trying to emerge from its millenary absence from the evolution, that is rejecting its archaic pastoral existence rules, Sonetaula is left alone with his life of bandit.

Maybe only 23 or 24 years old, Sonetaula, unable to trust and surrender to justice because too far from his known living codes, he plays his last card making an escape agreement with an ‘important person’, the ingegnere. A person reasonably trusted because of his high social position that, instead, has other interests than saving a poor shepherd life.

This movie has of course the charm of a neorealist movie. They took one year to shoot it, in real places, with real people, I mean non professional actors, and with real seasons, the director says. A photography very effective though, with major technological touches, maybe too many to be authentically neorealist. Nevertheless, valuable for its strong ability to make looks, silences, thoughts, feelings, talk.

However, Salvatore Mereu is not giving his true poetry, like he did in Ballo a Tre Passi. Fair enough, we know he will again.

Emilio comes from Emilia Romagna (region in the North of Italy, on the Riviera of Adriatic sea), and the only idea that he has of Sardinia is the hot tourist season during the summertime. However, once in Barbagia, the internal region of Sardinia probably the most remote, Emilio will face a totally different reality: bandits, bloodthirsty revenges, fear, psychological pressure, silence, resignation, mistrust.

This movie is about recalling the attention into a reality that is forgotten or even unknown to the rest of Italy. The Barbagia is renowned to be house to bandits, in the real meaning, since always. At the beginning of 1900 the Italian government sent forces to defeat the banditry, with some success, however without rooting out its culture. Because the banditry in Barbagia, in Sardinia, it’s a culture which derives from its anthropological history. Even if nowadays they are not that popular anymore and they are more threatened, some still exist and operate, because it is in their inner soul, in their ancestral instinct, is like a last attempt to preserve the species.

Furthermore, lifestyle changed very little, especially for those who work in the ship farming, where rules and laws keep ancient codes.

It is the nature, which remains hidden into a wild heart and in the harsh attitude that D.H. Laurence in its Sea and Sardinia book despite their black skirt and their white shirts with puffed sleeves sees the Sardinian man “so beautiful and stupendously masculine!”

“He walks with his hands behind the back, slow, straight, and detached. Wonderful untamable haughtiness… How beautiful the virility is when it finds its own expression!…”

Well, I just wanted to provide a small cultural background to suggest a deeper reading of such a society. However, a crime is a crime. Likely are very rare today.

For your information the director is a carabiniere in real life and is sardo as well. He was nominated for Donatello award 2004 as best new director.

Check my review of Ballo a tre passi, and watch the video to see the typical Sardinian costume, nowadays more rarely used.

Sardinia, where its crystal waters are seen with suspects, and its dark remote caves are a shelter. A land of sheep and shepherd; cardoons and cork oaks, basalt and granite; tough orbace and delicate filigree; slanting eyes and black, thick eyebrows; legend and truth; divinities and saints. Land where everything is elusive and stationary at once. Where people talks with the look. Where the sun doesn’t bring smiles, and the light is in the night.

With this peculiar, unique background Salvatore Mereu, young director, brought to life a little masterpiece of colors, feelings, characters, and sceneries. Clearly inspired to the visionary representation of Fellini, sweetly surrealistic, he fulfills our desire of cinema with no expectations.

Divided into 4 chapters, linked to the 4 seasons, he traces a profile of Sardinian life that is naive and sweet. He’s able to bring out the poetry hidden inside its ancestral tight limits. The Spring, the discovery, when the children run toward the sea for the first time, on those interminable dunes of white sand. The summer, the wonder, when the shepherd meets the love among his remote caves. The autumn, the look back, when the young noun comes back to the village for a wedding that could have been hers. The winter, the dignity, when the old man tries to escape from the unavoidable lonely life of the city through the dream and the kindness of a prostitute.

A movie difficult to follow if you need a traditional plot, but art doesn’t need a plot. This is a sweet romantic photo of the hidden poetry of Sardinia.

Since I couldn’t find a trailer, this is a piece of real life from the village where my sister lives, Bortigali (area Il Marghine, province Nuoro, Sardegna) .

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