BOSCO GRANDE

Sergione, a 50-year-old tattoo artist weighing 260 kg, has lived all his life in the working-class Palermo district of Bosco Grande. He was one of the city’s legendary punks, rebelling against the mafia culture of the 1980s. Thirty years later, he’s still sitting outside his mother’s house, doing drugs and partying with his street friends.
Every time I return to my hometown, I go and listen to his tragi-comic anecdotes and longings for escape. As the seasons go by, I watch Sergio deteriorate. In mortal danger, he goes to a specialized center for super-obese people, from which he escapes a month later. Back in Bosco Grande, true to his punk mantra: «Live fast, die young», he once again gets bogged down in the morbid spiral of his addictions.

«Making a documentary about Sergio means confronting my Sicilian background, a working-class culture rich in irony, passion and humanity. The camera I turn to Sergio, with loving complicity, reveals my own identity, as in a mirror, the wounds inflicted by a certain violent, mafia mentality. Sergio is an eternal 1980s punk struggling against a world drugged by power and money. His huge, immobile body is the emblem of his desperate rebellion against atavistic, patriarchal values.

Bosco Grande represents the last piece of a reflection on my home- town, Palermo, which began with my novels and previous documentaries: Apolitics Now - Tragi-comedy of an Election Campaign (2013) and The Shadow of the Godfather (2016). The film pays tribute to the vibrant and restless soul of this place that I love and hate viscerally, to its people, but above all to Sergio, a sort of double of mine who never left home, a character in search of an author, who remained there, in Bosco Grande, faithful to his role until the end.»