Sicilian Ghost Story

A small village at the edge of a forest in Sicily. Giuseppe is thirteen and one day he does not come back from school. Nobody talks. Families teach their children not to ask and the teachers do not raise it; everyone in the village knows something and nobody says it. Luna is a girl from his class who liked him. She will not accept it. She starts searching: she writes letters, walks in the forest and presses her friends. Alongside this the narrative shows the place where Giuseppe is held. Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza write and direct. It is an Italian production. The event behind the narrative is real; a boy was abducted in Sicily and held for more than two years, and the case caused great outrage in the country. The film opened Critics' Week at Cannes. The form is a fairy tale; the real event is told in the structure of one, and the nature, the lake and the forest are part of that structure. That choice caused argument; some commentators found giving a real crime the form of a fairy tale problematic. The real matter it works at is silence; the narrative takes not the perpetrators but the community that says nothing. The photography is strong and the scenes in nature carry the emotional weight. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian art cinema and formal experiment. Who it is not for: the subject is extremely heavy, the pace slow, and the fairy tale form can sit at odds with it.