Like their 2013 debut Salvo, the second feature from Sicilian filmmakers Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza is a visually dazzling, offbeat take on the traditional mafia picture.
Sicilian Ghost Story is based on the true story of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the 12-year-old son of a mafioso who was abducted in 1993 in an attempt to stop his father becoming an informer. Rather than tackle the events head-on in a realist style, Grassadonia and Piazza adapt Marco Mancassola’s fable-like short story The White Knight (2011), which views the events of the Di Matteo kidnapping from the perspective of one of his classmates. The film brings together the directors’ interest in the transformative power of a romantic relationship with what they describe as ‘the most terrible, most painful event in the Sicily of those years’.
The film’s extraordinarily textured, mobile widescreen photography is by Luca Bigazzi, frequent collaborator of Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo, The Great Beauty, The Young Pope). From the enigmatic opening shot, Bigazzi, Grassadonia and Piazza create a gothic, almost fairy-tale atmosphere which was partly influenced by the landscape photography of the British artist Darren Almond.
DIRECTOR: Fabio Grassadonia, Antonio Piazza
CAST: Julia Jedlikowska, Gaetano Fernandez, Corinne Musallari, Andrea Falzone, Federico Finocchiaro, Lorenzo Curcio
YEAR: 2017
COUNTRY: Italy/France/Switzerland/USA
PROJECTION FORMAT: Digital
DURATION: 122 mins
Age Guidance
15
