Federica Di Giacomo
Liberami

Last night Rai Storia – a channel towards which my admiration grows alongside my interest in cinema – aired Liberami by Federica di Giacomo in the late-night slot. Today, for the first time after years of furiously closing all streaming pages requiring it, I registered on the Rai Play portal to watch it.

''Liberami'' is a documentary released in 2016, winner of the Orizzonti section at the 73rd Venice Film Festival. The liberation referred to in the title is that from demonic possession. The film follows a Sicilian community led by Father Cataldo, a nationally renowned exorcist who is besieged by requests for exorcisms from many people, both young and adult, who turn to him to be helped in fighting the devil. Particularly, the camera follows, both inside and outside the church and liberation masses, four people; two women, a girl, and a boy.

The first and most important peculiarity of the film is precisely its documentary approach to a subject like exorcisms, which is generally treated in genre films or through a view closer to the ecclesiastical environment. The theme is certainly difficult to tackle from a super partes perspective, devoid of stylistic connotations, but Di Giacomo manages it. The exorcism is documented as a daily episode: Father Cataldo receives dozens of people a day, and sometimes sends them home because he doesn't have time to listen to them all. Those who undergo exorcism are captured in the everyday life of this practice: it is not an event that takes them by surprise; on the contrary, in many cases, they have been in the same condition for a long time. They have accepted the presence of the devil inside them and fight to free themselves from it. However, the director does not delve into the context of individual experiences but only shows snippets of exorcisms and the reactions of the exorcised and those who accompany them. They are brief snapshots of a more complex story that remains obscure to the viewer.

These are inserted in a community context: the liberation masses are a collective event where everyone joins in renouncing Satan and assisting those who seem truly possessed by Satan. Moans, groans, and screams rise from the crowd: a subdued cry of pain that then erupts and is drowned out by prayer. The possessed do not hide, as one of them says, why be ashamed? Better to face the situation and not let evil win. The priest is the first to give these events a communal character, to then receive the faithful privately as well. And not only that. Exorcisms also take place over the phone for the most stubborn demons: the priest's spiritual support is high, as it would probably be more challenging to achieve in a big city.

In fact, what strikes most is the everyday nature of exorcism. Exorcism loses its sacred and dark dimension and, on the contrary, becomes an integral part of daily life, just as illness is for those who fight it every day. And in everyday life, the boundary between sacred and profane becomes more blurred, and the contamination between dimensions produces a surprising effect more than a grotesque one: because what we see is a reality, alien and distant to most, under a new, intimate, and popular light at the same time. During the exorcism, the father's comparison of the demon's voice to a wild cat, and before that, to what? – one of the exorcised and her sister wonder – A mobster. They laugh, and the priests also chuckle at the stubbornness of the devil who just doesn't want to leave. Because exorcism, for them, is now a normal thing, as anyone knows who lives with treatments for an illness.

The relationship with the faith of the people examined is not always the same: there are those who see possession as the result of adultery and the sins of parents, associating them with an evil that has been sedimented in the family, those who see it as the only possible explanation alternative to madness, those who do not believe but faced with the objective reality of the illness have returned to the Church. Fragments of dialogues reveal diverse elements that leave many possibilities open for interpreting a phenomenon that is very well suited to attempts at rational reconstruction. Like the healing of someone who, in the end, is liberated but still cannot attend mass because something there still troubles them.

The director's gaze, in the last minutes, expands to reach Rome, where one of the seminars for exorcist priests in which Father Cataldo participates is held: it is the Church's response to the growing demand, in Italy and the world, for demons to be exorcised. In this way, the provincial experience assumes a global dimension that legitimizes it as a spokesperson for a broader and more heterogeneous reality, which always asks for only one thing: to be freed.