DARK DREAMS
Pan’s Labyrinth heads to Italy in Sicilian Ghost Story
Sicilian Ghost Story is an unusual film. On one hand it’s the dark story, based on fact, of a 12-year-old boy kidnapped from a small Sicilian village by the mafia. On the other, the film is described by writer/directors Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza as a fairytale, influenced by Charles Laughton’s Night Of The Hunter and Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen.
Like them, it envisions two pure-hearted children who are devoted to each other in the face of evil. The bold girl, Luna, desperately seeks her beloved Giuseppe, the missing boy, in a story that slides between reality and dream, possible and impossible. Not surprisingly, the directors acknowledge Pan’s Labyrinth as an influence, a film which similarly merged violent reality and lyrical fable.
Much of Sicilian Ghost Story depicts Luna searching through uncanny-feeling woods and lakes, their enchantment suggested by changing lenses and distorted angles; the strange light of false dawn; and partially unfocused images that were inspired by the illusionist art of Gerhard Richter. Water is a motif. The directors drew on myths of lakes as portals between the worlds of the living and dead. But water is also part of recent Sicilian history, when criminals used an artificial lake, a town’s water supply, to dispose of victims.
The film is a haunted house piece too. The children’s homes seem like mysterious dream palaces, more perilous than the wild woods. “Our films explore houses with stairs – not so common in Sicily,” Grassadonia says.
Equally important were the film’s eerie, hypnotically magnified natural soundscapes. “For us, the sound design is a key element of our storytelling,” says Piazza. “It’s always a relationship between the visible and the invisible. And you can shape the invisible through what is out of frame, the sound.” AO
Sicilian Ghost Story is in cinemas on 3 August.