cinematography
Federico Cammarata
Eugenio De Rosa
editing
Felice d‘Agostino
music
Gianluca Cangemi
sound
Mirko Cangiamila

with
Sergio Spatola
Clotilde Gaglio
Daniela Spatola
Maria Sardina
Luisa Sardina
Fabio Sgroi
Fabrizio Puleo
Dottore Maurizio Renda
Dottore Giuseppe Rotondo
Billo Svergognino

producer
Alexis Taillant
co-producer
Matteo Tortone
productions
France Télévisions
Wendigo Films
co-productions
Drôle de trame
Malfé Film

Sergione, a fifty-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 Giuseppe Schillaci returns to his hometown, he goes and listen to his tragicomic anecdotes and longings for escape. As the seasons go by, he watches Sergio deteriorate. In mortal danger, Sergio goes to a specialized center for super-obese people, from which he flees 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. 

2024 Bosco Grande (doc)
2022 Il Modernissimo di Bologna (doc)
2021 Zabut (short)
2019 Transhumance (VR, short)
2017 Tranzicion – arte e potere in Albania (doc)
2016 L’ombra del padrino – ricerche per un film (doc)
2013 Apolitics Now – tragicommedia di una campagna elettorale (doc)
2011 Cosmic Energy Inc. (doc)
2009 The Cambodian Room – situazioni con Antoine D’Agata (doc)

“For me, making a documentary about Sergio is a way of delving into my own Sicilian education, a folk culture brimming with irony, passion, and humanity. The camera I lovingly turn on Sergio reveals my own identity as well, like a mirror image, and the wounds inflicted by a certain violent, Mafia mentality. Sergio is an eternal punk from the 1980s, grappling with a world addicted to money and power. His enormous, motionless body is emblematic of his desperate revolt against atavic, patriarchal values. Bosco Grande is the culmination of a reflection I began on my native Palermo in my novels and previous documentaries. The film pays homage to the vibrant, restless soul of this place I love and hate so viscerally; it’s a tribute to its people, but above all to Sergio, my ‘double’, in a sense, but one who never left home: “a character in search of an author” who stayed in Bosco Grande and locked himself into his role until he died.” (Giuseppe Schillaci)

Giuseppe Schillaci published his first novel, L’anno delle ceneri, in 2010, and L’età definitiva in 2015. He’s an editor at Lit-blog Nazione Indiana and contributes to the French literary journals Revue Litteraire and Atelier du Roman, the Canadian Les Ecrits, and the Brazilian Mundo Mundano. As a filmmaker, he directed The Cambodian Room – situazioni con Antoine D’Agata in 2009. The documentary won numerous awards, including the Special Jury Prize at the Torino Film Festival. In 2011, he directed Cosmic Energy Inc., selected for Hot Docs at Toronto. Two years later, his Apolitics Now – tragicommedia di una campagna elettorale won the Italian Docs Londra Award and the Audience Award SalinaDocFest. In 2022, Schillaci made Il Modernissimo di Bologna, selected for the Torino Film Festival and winner of Best First Film at PriMed in Marseille. He also holds writing and filmmaking workshops at film schools and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.