An Italian fantasy story between history, Sicilian popular legends and coming of age in “Tindara and Carmelina – A Friendship Beyond the Ring” (Susil Edizioni), a novel by director Francisco Saia, presented on the occasion of the Rome Film Festival on Sunday 18 October at The Cineclub of the capital, in dialogue with the Messina journalist Marco Bonardelli. Born in Savona with paternal origins in Castroreale, the director – who opened the seventieth Taormina Film Festival in 2024 with his film “The Thief of Shooting Stars”, shot in Milazzo – returns to the town near Messina for a new presentation of his writing on Friday 23 October (6.00 pm) at Palazzo D’Amico. Also for the novel, Saia chooses Milazzo as the backdrop for the story, which welcomed him during the filming of his latest film work.
“An act of gratitude – underlined Bonardelli – but also of love towards a land that he has always considered home, combined with a passion for visionary dark fantasy à la Tim Burton”. The plot follows the events of Tindara and Carmelina, two very different creatures, profoundly alone and marginalized, who experience their relationship with time in an anomalous way. For Tindara, a little girl who lost her parents, life suddenly stopped; for Carmelina, a zombie stuck at ten years old, it hasn’t flowed for over a century. But when they come into contact with each other, everything will change and for both of them it will be the beginning of a friendship that goes beyond all boundaries. Together they will fight against the personification of evil, ‘U Sugghiu, the terrible monster of Sicilian folklore, the only one capable of taking the lives of the supernatural creatures of the Carmelina community, which remains hidden in the ghostly Villa Vaccarino, protected by a magical bubble called the “ring”.
“I have always wanted to create a work centered on the theme of friendship and above all that explained its value – said Saia – But another push for the creation of the novel was my love for Sicily and its popular traditions, its legends and mythologies. We have many in Italy, but Sicily in particular offers so much from this point of view and from the artistic, cultural and historical one”. In the story there are in fact historical and mythological figures and references such as Colapesce, the lupinarian, Joseph Isaac Spadafora Whitaker known as Pip, Vincenzo Florio and a reference to the Battle of Milazzo in 1860, combined with the dark and visionary cinema of Tim Burton, from which the main characters and elements of the plot are taken. “In “Tindara and Carmelina” I was inspired by him both for what concerns the figure of the outsider, the main characteristic of his characters, and for the idea of community, taken from “Miss Peregrine – Home for Peculiar Children”, the best fantasy film in the history of cinema. But in the novel there is also the typical mentality of Japanese cartoons of the 90s and 2000s where, unlike a lot of animation today, we are taught to face a problem and not avoid it.” As announced during the meeting, after the screening of the book trailer, an animated short film will be based on the novel, currently in production.