The sense of time passing, changing everything, which becomes memory or nostalgia, at the center of “Sciatunostro”, the fourth feature film by Leandro Picarella, presented on 19 October at the Rome Film Festival among the Special Screenings of the competition section “Progressive Cinema – Visions for the world of tomorrow”.
Two years after “Segnali di vita”, the director from Agrigento, who also takes care of the music for the film, returns to the Capitoline festival with a work that he defines as “cinema of reality”. “Neither documentary nor fiction, both if anything” underlines Picarella.
The film, through the theme of temporality, talks about phases of life, the difficult transition from childhood to pre-adolescence; but also of an internal time that accompanies the experiences of detachment and isolation.
The story tells the real story of Ettore (Ettore Pesaresi) and Giovannino (Giovanni Cardamone), inseparable friends aged eleven and seven, who on the island of Linosa (Agrigento), in the Pelagians, are preparing to live their last summer together.
Ettore, forced to move to the mainland to continue his studies, leaves a void on the island that Giovannino will have to fill. But the idea of making it into a film was born from the director’s period of residence on the island in 2021, and from the meeting with the archivist Pino Sorrentino, an elderly video amateur, whose camera had immortalized an enormous quantity of images from the 1960s onwards. The sharing of those images, combined with the collections of other amateur videos, thus becomes a metaphor of time that becomes shared memory, and the breath of the island – the sciatu – becomes the breath of an entire community.
“Observing and studying Pino’s images, I saw that this painstaking work of his really had time in itself. I realized that the colours, the clothes, the people changed, but something extremely present remained: the union between individuals, the friendship, the awareness of being living in a magical place a phase of magical life, which sooner or later ends. Then hanging out with young Ettore’s family and seeing him grow, it came naturally to me to unite Pino’s work on the summer friendship of the two boys, hypothesizing the possible transmission of knowledge that will then be useful to Giovannino to preserve the memory and shape new ones”.
Although nostalgia is one of the themes of the film, “Sciatunostro” is a celebration of life and the fundamental experiences that remain imprinted in everyone’s mind; a personal story that becomes universal.
“I believe that the power of cinema is to make us participants in a common story, in something that we have all experienced at least once in our lives. I tried to make these chords resonate starting first from myself, from my relationship with the island and then by experiencing this adventure with the kids.”
In the film Linosa is not just a set, but a living body, which breathes together with its inhabitants, in which a different perception of time is inherent: “It’s as if it takes you out of everyday life, due to its geographical position and the particular magnetism it emanates, as if it contains within itself all the “summers” of various lives. And the archive and the story of Ettore and Giovannino try to tell precisely this”.
“Sciatunostro” is a Qoomoon and Rai Cinema production in association with Albedo Production Weelsee, created with the support of the Sicilian Region, Sicilia Film Commission and PSC – Sicilian Development and Cohesion Plan. Still no news on the theatrical release.