18/06/2007

The arduous history of Sicily’s sulfur mines is revived through the memories of the last former miners in Pirrera, the documentary by Piero Messina (who co-produced Giovanni Davide Maderna’s Schopenhauer, in competition at Locarno 2006), which was presented in competition in the “extra large” section of the Roman festival Arcipelago.

Pirrera, which in the Sicilian dialect means “mine”, is moving for the violence of its stories (the miners lived and worked underground in conditions that were, to say the least, inhumane) and mitigated by the “nostalgia” with which these men, whose faces are gnarled and their bodies even more so, recall those years.

“Every day someone died,” the documentary tells us, “and the most atrocious thing was that the miner didn’t even have the right to be buried because the Catholic Church considered his death a suicide”.

Other lives marked by difficulty are those of Pietro De Maria and Daila Dameno, recounted in Con i denti e con le unghie by Stefano Pasetto (Tartarughe sul dorso, In mancanza d’ali). The film shows the two men, both left wheelchair-bound after grave accidents, as they prepare for the mono-ski races of the 2006 Paralympic Games in Turin.

Said the director: “Pietro De Maria spoke to me about the designing of the mono-ski. I slowly began to understand that the sport was taking on a metaphorical sense and was just the tip of the iceberg”.

(Translated from Italian)