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Tonight the atmosphere in Piazza San Cosimato is different from usual.
The film will start at 9:30 PM, actually tonight it will start even later but by 8:00 PM the first three rows are all occupied: RESERVED SEATS.
It's a night of SPORT and CRAZINESS. Italo Cucci is also here with a well-groomed beard and white hair like an aspiring godfather.
They will screen CRAZY FOR FOOTBALL, a 2016 documentary by Volfango De Blasi. This docu-film won the Donatello for Best Documentary.
On December 31, 2016, De Blasi received a call from the Japanese. We would like to do the futsal world championship for the insane, would you like to participate? The futsal world championship for psychiatric patients in Osaka, in Japan there are still asylums.
Be it as it may, Volfango accepts the challenge and makes a documentary, actually a film, about it.
The team consists of the sporting director, psychiatrist Santo Rullo, Enrico Zanchini, the coach, and the athletic trainer, former boxer Vincenzo Cantatore.
Their goal is to create, with very little time available, a futsal team to bring to the world championships.
They have only a month and a half available.
On to the selections, here’s the team:
The goalkeeper: an Italo-Uruguayan aged 53 I have always taken psycho-drugs, since the age of 10, I'm crazy, what can I do?
A defender: a taciturn guy, relational difficulties, face semi-hidden in a hoodie but at the world championships, he'll show his teeth, he'll be a lion
Another defender: used to be a policeman, was an escort for Cossiga. Big, burly, good… slowly he went off the rails heard voices. I am proud to go to Japan, the Japanese are a model, to make one Japanese it takes 100 Germans
The playmaker: a Sardinian in his 40s who sometimes gets lost, loses direction, he too hears voices, many hear voices. He is the playmaker, a juggler, a seal with a ball then I realized that juggling was useless it was just my thing, now I play for the team
And many others.
They will form a team, a true team. They will finally find a sense of belonging, they will finally have a goal, they will feel important for once, launched towards the outside, towards real life, interacting with others. For a while, the monsters in their heads will loosen their grip, they will find a challenge to match them. Sport as therapy. And it works, oh does it work.
They are pure souls, fragile unfortunate men. From life, they have never had anything, only voices in the head, psycho-drugs, the TSO... But this time they have to train to go to the world championship and they will give it everything, and then some.
And we will realize that they are not that crazy, that they are like us, just a bit less lucky.
The film, beautiful, avoids rhetoric and a certain Catholic-bourgeois pietism and shows things as they are. And the insane are finally treated as people, indeed as athletes, as players.
CRAZY FOR FOOTBALL
An absolute must-see.
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