Giuseppe Sciarra
Ikos

The most beautiful Italian film of 2021? It's called "Ikos" by Giuseppe Sciarra.

Giuseppe Sciarra is a young Apulian director worth keeping an eye on, because if the premises are those we have seen in his short documentary "Ikos", we are facing a future great film director.

"Ikos" will be premiered in Rome soon. I had the pleasure of seeing it exclusively, and I was more than impressed. The short is shocking and moving, a masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. It speaks in a raw but at the same time delicate way about a story of injustice silenced for years by Sciarra, trying not to make the viewer shed a tear too easily but rather putting honesty and a lot of heart into the elegant narration and the poetry of the images, master paintings that will stay with you for a long time (the image of Sciarra in silhouette quoting Munch's The Scream or where the director is completely naked on some brambles).

Giuseppe Sciarra, through footage of his first communion, has his story told and interpreted by an excellent and unforgettable Edoardo Purgatori (on the verge of sweeping awards). We are in Italy in the nineties, the time of Tangentopoli, Berlusconi, Forza Italia, and cult TV programs like Non è la Rai, Stran'amore, or Carramba che Sorpresa. An Italy believing in its rebirth after the mafia massacres, where opulence and economic well-being gradually start to show their first cracks. In this Italy that still hopes and lives by appearances, a child whose fault is being defenseless and pure will pay dearly for his naivety in a macho and mafioso southern Italy far from being marginal. In Ikos, a taboo breaks, one of those toughest for public opinion, because the monsters Sciarra loudly accuses of having ruined his life are not adults but children, bullies who with verbal and physical violence, slander, and cruel jokes drive a peer guilty of not being like them to suicide.

A dark story, that of the Foggia director, finds strength in an atypical and original representation. And it is precisely this that makes "Ikos" a sui generis documentary, even experimental, using archival footage alternated with symbolic images where Sciarra and Purgatori show us a martyrdom staging between sacred and profane, Pasolini, Fellini, Sorrentino. It also tells us something else, a rebirth through acts of psychomagic by Alejandro Jodorowsky. The magical and esoteric subtext of Ikos is more than evident and enchanting. It could have weighed down or trivialized the story, and yet the magic of certain mysterious sequences tailored by the two directors of photography (Andrea Natale and Enrico Manfredi Fratarelli) makes Ikos a work of art where Italian cinema reclaims its oneiric dimension thanks to magical symbols like the moon, the sun, an ancient African mask, and a dark god loved by Jung called Abraxas tattooed on Sciarra's arm. Absolutely a must-see as soon as it is presented.