Director’s note:

Sicily is a second home to me. I have been living for months in Sicily since I was a child. Even though each year I come closer to thinking I know it and understand it, only to realise that I am similar to one of Plato’s prisoners who looks at the sun in the cave’s allegory. In the same way as they can’t clearly detect the sunlight after a long time spent in darkness, I am blinded by the discovery of unanticipated microcosms I make during my travels. Despite my ability to observe, I always need new tools to understand its imagery and sounds, the serendipitous encounters, the startling nuances and adventitious mysteries I find there. As someone who comes from a non religious perspective, the encounter with San Salvatore and the black saint was striking to me. I entered in this astonishing world suspended between the sense of community and intimacy with respect and curiosity. I soon realised the way of the body represented by the life size “ex votos” is the correlate of this tension between realism and surrealism that seems to make this world survive. The attempt to capture this antinomy was the motivation for me to keep looking, keep filming, to keep finding details, images and sounds that could embody this connection between spirituality and oddity I kept encountering as I was filming. I sensed there was a proposition in me this world was asking to look more closely, to go beyond an anthropological glance, to rather find visual connections and intimate correlations that could explain the relationship between human being and nature. The black saint’s journey and the ability of the saint to heal became metaphors for the right all human beings have to break free and learn about new worlds to learn about themselves.