South Is Nothing

Description

It’s not a spoiler to reveal that, despite appearances, the amazing kid at the center of this very particular coming-of-age tale, set in a small fishing village across the Strait of Messina from Sicily, is a girl. Why 17-year-old Grazia (Miriam Karlkvist) has taken on an androgynous physique is one of the film’s sustaining mysteries. Is Grazia manning up as she wishes her father, Cristiano, a fishmonger, would do against the local mafia who are forcing him out of business? Or is she a replacement son following the presumed death of her beloved older brother Pietro? Anger at the silence around Pietro’s disappearance leads Grazia to her own magical-real conclusions; he his nowhere and appears everywhere. Director Fabio Mollo, shooting in his native Reggio Calabria, doesn’t define the territory so much as abstract and defamiliarize it, for example, in a religious festival where silent townsmen parading the altar become a tragic and threatening unity. In such oblique ways we sense more than learn what Cristiano, his son and now his daughter are up against. The code of silence—a form of nihilism, the “nothing” of the film’s title—is what the girl must shatter in order to live as herself. –Judy Bloch

Film Details