Michele Pennetta’s new documentary Il Mio Corpo (2020) is a poetical reflection on agency and the possibility to determine the course of one’s own life. Slow-paced and cinematic, this partly fictionalized documentary portrays the realities of Oscar and Stanley, two young men of different backgrounds having something fundamental in common: at this point in their lives, they both have no other option but to let life happen to them, driven by their own circumstances and by others.

Oscar and Stanley

Oscar spends his days working for his father together with his older brother, scrapping for valuable materials in landfills under the bright Sicilian sun. At the beginning of the film, from the top of a bridge looking down the landfill, we see his father coordinating the search and recovery process offering, instead of encouragement, threats and curses, making sure to remind Oscar constantly of how useless he is. Such instances are not occasional. Throughout the film, the only resourcefulness the father shows is his ability to find new ways to control and humiliate his son, blaming him for a wide range of shortcomings, imagined or otherwise, including his own. The father is the ultimate toxic parent, using his two sons as personal assets he can deploy to do work for him while he smokes and observes. And even after a good day of finding valuables, he cannot find a good word for Oscar, instead of telling him he would, at any time, exchange him for a Moroccan.

The subtitles translate the Italian word marrochino (Moroccan) – wrongly – as «black person», which creates the transition to introducing Stanley, a young Nigerian who crossed the Mediterranean to #Sicily in hopes of a better life. Just like Oscar, Stanley works hard, and he feels lucky to have miraculously received a 2-year stay visa. But looking at Stanley’s life, there is nothing truly miraculous in it: displaced and lonely, he spends his days doing whatever meager jobs come his way so to secure his survival on the Italian island.

Oscar and Stanley’s life are different but not too much so. A fine thread of arrested agency links them, and the inability to stand up and walk out of their circumstances, at least for now. They both don’t find the space to express their true feelings and wants. They don’t complain, they just keep going. But behind their silence and long stares into the void, there is a world we can intuitively imagine. They take things as they are and bottle up their emotions, but behind their coping, they are aware and vigilant. This coping and resilience point to the opposite of hopelessness, to the profound fact that even in the direst of circumstances, one has a space inside themselves they can keep private; a space from which one can observe and wait.

Silence

The key to understanding Pannetta’s film is silence. The depth of the film is precisely in what happens between the dialogues. The weight of that silence is a metaphor for the characters’ strength and dignity and for something more. It’s in silence that the characters stand out clearer, their presence tender, delicate and pulsing, making one want to hold them if only for a moment and reassure them that everything is going to be fine.

This coping and resilience point to the opposite of hopelessness

Silence is the true companion of waiting, and waiting goes hand in hand with one element that does work in the advantage of both young men. In circumstances in which it seems that nothing is changing, surprisingly their asset is the passing time. With each moment, Oscar is growing into a young adult that will be able to walk out of his family, should he decide to do so. With each moment, Stanley might get closer to having the legal status that will allow him to move on, leave the island, and start anew.

Waiting

The film is partially scripted and, in many ways, driven by the director’s vision of juxtaposing reality and metaphor, through a careful choice of frames and sequences. Essentially the narrative builds on meaning not on action, through expertly curated editing of scenes, which creates the layers of both story and metaphor. Through this ‘artistic treatment of reality’, Pennetta takes the reality of the two characters to tell not only about it but also to turn it into a reflection on something existential, something found, at least to some degree, in everyone’s life. Oscar and Stanley’s paths intersect – if only at the end and for the sake of symbolism – but in a broader sense, their paths intersect with anyone’s that has struggled in their lives, through long moments in which the only choice was to keep pulsing, burring their true self somewhere deep and safe, waiting for time to pass long enough to create the opening for something new.