by Giuseppe Schillaci
A documentary film directed by Giuseppe Schillaci
produced by Alexis Taillant
A co-production by Wendigo Films / Drôle de Trame / France 3 Corse – Via Stella / Malfé Film
with the support of CNC, Procirep, Société des Producteurs and Angoa
Directors of photography: Federico Cammarata and Eugenio De Rosa
Editing: Felice D’Agostino
Original music: Gianluca Cangemi and MG
Genre: Documentary
Duration: 75 minutes
Year: 2024
With
Sergio Spatola, Clotilde Gaglio, Daniela Spatola, Maria Sardina, Luisa Sardina, Fabio Sgroi, Fabrizio Puleo, Dr. Maurizio Renda, Dr. Giuseppe Rotondo, Billo Svergognino
© France Télévisions / Wendigo Films / Drôle de Trame 2024
Synopsys
Sergione, a fifty-year-old tattoo artist weighing 260 kg, has lived his entire life in Palermo, in the working-class neighborhood of Bosco Grande. He is one of the city’s legendary punks, a rebel against the bourgeois and mafia culture of the 1980s. Thirty years later, Sergio is still there: sitting in front of his mother’s house, drinking and joking with neighborhood friends. Every time I return to my hometown, I see him to hear his tragicomic anecdotes and dreams of a different life, outside the prison he has built for himself.
But as the seasons pass, his health steadily worsens. To save his life, Sergio checks into a specialized center for the severely obese—only to flee after just one month. Back in Bosco Grande, true to his punk mantra “live fast – die young,” he sinks deeper into the spiral of his addictions.
2024 Bosco Grande (doc)
2022 Il Modernissimo di Bologna (doc)
2021 Zabut (cm)
2019 Transhumance (VR, cm)
2017 Tranzicion – arte e potere in Albania (doc)
2016 L’ombra del padrino – ricerche per un film (doc)
2013 Apolitics Now – tragicommedia di una campagna elettorale (doc)
2011 Cosmic Energy Inc. (doc)
2009 The Cambodian Room – situazioni con Antoine D’Agata (doc)
“Making a documentary about Sergio means confronting my Sicilian upbringing — a popular culture rich in irony, passion, and humanity. The camera I turn toward Sergio, with loving complicity, reveals my own identity, like a mirror, exposing the wounds inflicted by a certain violent, mafia-driven mentality. Sergio is an eternal punk from the 1980s, struggling against a world addicted to power and money. His enormous, motionless body is the emblem of his desperate rebellion against archaic, patriarchal values.
Bosco Grande represents the final piece in a personal reflection on my hometown, Palermo, a journey that began with my novels and previous documentaries: Apolitics Now – A Tragicomedy of an Election Campaign (2013) and The Godfather’s Shadow (2016). The film is a tribute to the vibrant and restless soul of this place I love and hate with visceral intensity, to its people — but above all, to Sergio: a kind of double of mine who never left home, a character in search of an author, who remained in Bosco Grande, faithful to his role until the end. A leading role in both his life and our film, of which Sergio is, in fact, the co-director — not only for his ability to shape his own destiny in a conscious and poetic way, but also for the generous trust he placed in our friendship.
Bosco Grande is the fruit of this simple, authentic relationship, built around shameless complicity, innocent lies — like all true friendships, irrational and powerful, like when you’re thirteen.”
(Giuseppe Schillaci)
In 2010, Giuseppe Schillaci published his debut novel, L’anno delle ceneri (The Year of Ashes), followed in 2015 by L’età definitiva (The Definitive Age). He is an editor for the lit-blog Nazione Indiana and contributes to the French literary magazines Revue Littéraire and Atelier du Roman, the Canadian journal Les Écrits, and the Brazilian publication Mundo Mundano.
As a filmmaker, in 2009 he directed The Cambodian Room – Situations with Antoine D’Agata, a documentary that received numerous awards, including the Special Jury Prize at the Torino Film Festival. In 2011, he directed Cosmic Energy Inc., which was presented at Hot Docs in Toronto. Two years later, with Apolitics Now – A Tragicomedy of an Election Campaign, he won the Italian Docs London Award and the Audience Award at the SalinaDocFest.
In 2022, he made Il Modernissimo di Bologna, which was selected at the Torino Film Festival and awarded Best Film at PriMed in Marseille. He also leads writing and filmmaking workshops at film schools and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.