notes on the last beach of palermo

As my short film L’ultima spiaggia di Palermo, conceived and shot over CCT’s Palermo residency program during the summer of 2018, is premiering at a variety of Italian festivals including Cinema e Ambiente (Avezzano), Strano Film Festival (Capestrano) and Sandalia Sustainability Film Festival (several cities of Sardegna), I wanted to share the story of how the project came to be as well as some of the driving ideas behind it.

The myth of Colapesce

As it is told and retold, a long time ago in Sicily lived a young boy named Colapesce. The ragazzo was a fisherman’s son and had therefore a very strong bond to the sea, such an intimate relationship with its waters that in fact many believed him to be half-man, half-fish. His incomparable diving skills earned him fame all across the island, one day calling the attention of King Federico II. Willing to put the young boy’s abilities to test while seeing an opportunity to discover what wonders hid deep underwater, the monarch took him on a boat ride to high-sea. He then dared Cola to retrieve a series of objects he would throw into the water: first a cup, then a ring… After diving in for a few minutes, the boy would always return to the surface with the lost object and some new information about how deep the sea was. As Italo Calvino retells the fable, the insatiably curious king wanted the boy to go even further. So on the third time, he threw in his heavy crown.

“A crown like no other in the world” – said the king. – “Cola, you have to go and get it!”
(Una corona che non ce n’è altra al mondo – disse il Re. – Cola, devi andarla a prendere!)

“If you so desire, majesty,” – said Cola – “I’ll go down. But my heart tells me I won't come back up.”
(Se voi così volete, Maestà, – disse Cola –- scenderò. Ma il cuore mi dice che non tornerò più su.)

But the king insisted that he dive in nevertheless. And while searching for the precious crown in the deep dark sea, the boy found something else. He discovered that there were three pillars sustaining the island of Sicily: one intact, one cracked, and one already rotten, on the verge of crumbling down. In order to save the island, Cola decided to stay underwater and thus carry the rotten pillar on his shoulders. The king never saw either the boy or his crown again. As to Colapesce, legend has it that he remains on that same spot up to this day, as the the only entity preventing Sicily from drowning and falling into eternal oblivion.

Finding Palermo’s last beach

I came upon this fascinating myth during my three-month long research about the history of Palermo. I started diving into regional literature, film works and academic texts (1) as soon as I had found out I’d been selected to take part in CCT-See City’s five-day summer residency in the capital of Sicily, where I’d have the chance to work on a film project. Over preliminary Skype talks with CCT’s director Elena Mazzoni Wagner, we developed the idea of focusing on the city’s relationship with the sea, a vital element in the life of the islanders and yet denied throughout most of their past. Our thought was to use the sea as a starting point to delve into other topics of public interest, such as the intrinsic relation between preserving memory and the environment, as well as the problematic forging of a Sicilian identity. Was the island’s long record of violence and neglect proof of an unchangeable fate, or could its history be written differently? Was there an alternative road, a hopeful path, to be followed?

Having established the framework of our documentary, the next step was to develop a structure for the narrative. Given the short period of my stay, it would be best to arrive with a clear idea of what, when and where to shoot. This is when Elena referred me to a book by local journalist and theatre director Roberto Alajmo, titled Palermo is an Onion (Palermo è una cipolla, 2005). In a somewhat raucous, often humorous way, Alajmo addresses an imaginary traveller who has decided to explore the entire Palermitan coast “from Settecannoli in the south to Sferracavallo in the north.” What follows is a detailed description of each individual beach and its characteristic landscapes, smells and dwellers, a colourful travel diary which quickly gave us the impression that it could be transformed into an exciting kind of road movie. Even though some things had changed since the book had been written in the early 2000s, the nature of the coast was still accurately depicted. In the south, polluted portions of beach that had decayed after decades of unplanned growth and neglectful state-mafia politics. Meanwhile, in the north, the hyped and semi-privatised seaside village of Mondello, distant from the historical center and hard to access without a car. Finally, in the middle of all this, there was Sant’Erasmo. This tiny, hidden beach that we would soon refer to as Palermo’s last.

Alajmo’s book gave us some much needed spatial orientation as well as an initial script to rely on. On July 18th, upon landing at the Falcone-Borsellino airport (named after the two magistrates who were murdered by the Cosa Nostra in 1992 and became national martyrs of the antimafiosi movement), I met with my friend Marcelo Andreatini, who’d come to help me out as a simultaneous translator and sound specialist – I’d like to use this opportunity to once again thank him for his endless support. As two São Paulo-born Brazilians of Italian descent, Marcelo and I felt at home from the beginning: the warm, moist air filling our lungs and making the hair stick to our foreheads; the crowded streets pulsating with loud passersby and buses that would never come; the smell of delicious fried dough on every other corner… The fact that everything felt so familiar made it easier to approach the subjects of the documentary, since we felt less like foreigners and more like distant relatives visiting a long missed part of our family (2).

And who were these subjects we approached? Lyrically speaking, they could be thought of as incarnations of Colapesce, regular folks who seemed to carry the Sicilian burden on their backs. People like Piero – “un ragazzo sensa lavoro”, as he defines himself –, a jobless guy who makes a living by taking care of small boats and selling beverages in the last remaining bathing beach of the historical center, Porticciolo Sant’Erasmo. Aside from these informal occupations, Piero tirelessly cleans up the beach every single day without receiving anything in return. His indefatigable drive is mesmerising to watch.

It was thanks to Elena that we came across Piero. As soon as we met him, it was clear that if there was going to be any protagonist in our film, it was destined to be him. Before we could even ask for permission to film, Piero very naturally took over the main role. He was asking us to record him at work, which meant him complaining about people’s manners while removing beer bottles, dead fish, dog poop and every possible kind of trash left on the sand overnight. He’s outspoken and resolute like few people I’ve met, his charisma making itself notable in the kindness and deference with which the beach community treats him, from the old fishermen to the soccer playing teens.

Piero is, put differently, the self-appointed guardian of that small beach – and the fact that he almost never leaves this place resonates even more with the amphibian nature of Colapesce. To show how deeply interwoven he was with the sea, I usually tell the following anecdote. As soon as it’d become clear that he was our star, I made plans to film him at home alongside his wife and two kids. In my mind I’d already envisioned powerful wide-angle shots of a tired man trying to find rest in his cramped up apartment, him removing the sand from his neon-bright orange swimming trunks while waiting on some coffee to boil on the stove. But on the five days that we spent on that beach, Piero was so busy that he never actually went home. Every time I would ask him when he was planning on leaving, he’d impatiently reply me that he’d do it later (“più tardi, più tardi!”), though he’d always end up spending the whole day there until finally sleeping to the sound of the waves, inside an improvised camping tent. It was then that I realised that Sant’Erasmo was his de facto home, a shelter from a life in the city that had not always been nice to people like him.

Stessa spiaggia, stesso mare

Elio, a friendly Danny DeVito-like man who loads his canoe on top of his comically small Volkswagen beetle, only so he may take it to the beach a couple of times a week. Gino, a laconic husband and father of twins, who sings and plays the guitar while his bare feet touch the muddy sand. They are two of many fascinating characters that breathe daily life into the beach of Sant’Erasmo.

For them, this small port is not only one of the last refuges where they can reconnect with the sea in the city center, but it is also a community, a kind of family. Through daily rituals of swimming, diving, fishing, rowing, bathing and making themselves and others wet, these simple Palermitans reclaim a formerly abandoned part of the coast and resignify it as a safe space where memories and affects can resist the test of time and the ghosts of “progress”. Regardless of where they may leave to by the end of the day, the people of Sant’Erasmo always come back to the “same beach, same sea,” thus illustrating the romantic mindset from a few verses of musica leggera by Piero Focaccia – whose song we had the luck to hear (and record!) Gino play on our very last day at the beach.

The small port of Sant’Erasmo emerges as a clear counterpoint to the Sacco di Palermo, the massive concrete landscape that resulted from a decades-long politics of irregular building carried out by corrupt contractors. It stands in contrast to the beaches of the south for being full of lively bathers; and it differs from the more upper-class beach of Mondello in the north for being fenceless, chaotic and free of charge. As the open stage where characters perform their rituals of recalling and resisting, Sant’Erasmo is where we wanted to start and finish our film. Together with talented co-writer and editor Beatriz Krieger, who rendered the work’s compelling rhythm and coherence, I fancied the idea of circular narrative.

We decided the film should begin with a blurry, dreamlike sequence of full aquatic immersion reminiscent of a child’s fragmented account of her first trip to the sea. This sequence is narrated by renowned Sicilian musician Etta Scollo, who was also kind enough to provide the film with a beautiful Sicilian soundtrack. Etta’s strongly synesthetic remembrance then fades away to give place to Alajmo’s travelogue of the coast, a south-north journey through the brutal architecture of today’s Palermo, a cement jungle where the sea may make itself felt and presumed, but where it will only rarely show its true, untamed form. We try to convey this tension of presence/absence by introducing a series of fast-paced shots framed in a way that pushes the sea to the almost invisible background, or by shots that evoke the motif of the sea in only associative fashion. For instance, one could think of the shot that carries the sound of waves while depicting not the water, but rather a boat abandoned on the street, or the one of a building with various shades of blue towels and sheets hanging from it.

As Alajmo’s traveller (and, consequently, the spectator she embodies) reaches the middle of the route, she meets Piero, unwavering guardian of the hidden harbour of Sant’Erasmo. Although her trip to the north –  plus a short excursion to the past (3) – has to eventually continue, the traveller always ends up returning to this same beach, same sea, with the important difference that, every time she comes back, the camera and characters are a bit closer to interacting with the water. This gradual approximation culminates in the final sequence of the film, a song of praise to the sea and the full-bodied pleasures it conveys, a lively mosaic of maritime scenes that is aligned with the tactile opening sequence narrated by Etta.

Closing notes: Palermo as it is?

In my perception highly moulded by the reflexive tradition of Cinema Verité, documentary filmmaking is less about conveying an unmediated truth and more about the “creative treatment of actuality”, as John Grierson once put it. Assuming that an accurate representation of reality is a priori impossible due to the essentially disruptive presence of the camera itself, the most ethical thing to do when producing a doc is not purporting to portray an alleged ‘reality as it is’, but being as faithful as possible to your own experience when shooting the events, hence passing “from the plain descriptions of natural material to arrangements, rearrangements, and creative shapings of it” (4).

Having this in mind, my goal was not to “present Palermo as it is”, but to transmit part of the Palermo that I encountered: its stories, characters and atmospheres entangled within my personal experience. A constant flow of people enacting a city in quasi-mythological manner, creating stories of self-sacrifice that merge a quiet longing for days gone by with the desperate urge to come to terms with an ultraviolent past. The Palermo that I met, and consequently the Palermo that I wished to disclose, was a city inherently shaped by heroic myths: from the sole guardian who watches over the last remaining beach, to the virtually beatified Letizia Battaglia, a photographer turned patron saint, whose art and activism were and continue to be crucial in the construction of antimafia resistance (5).

It was when filming these people that Colapesce resurfaced before me time and time again. He appeared not only through the resemblance of Palermitans who seemed to consciously carry a burden that was much greater and older than themselves, but also by means of the very act of shooting the film. For it seems to me that diving into the unknown and making discoveries that will inevitably change reality as it is adequately describes both the job of the documentary filmmaker and the fate of the boy who bears Sicily on his back.

Footnotes

(1) Here I’d like to cite Jane and Peter Schneider’s book Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia, and the Struggle for Palermo (2003), which granted me most of my historical and sociological knowledge about Sicily; and Vittorio de Sica’s last film Il Viaggio (1974), an intoxicating Palermo-set melodrama that helped me set the mood before the actual trip.

(2) The theme of cross-cultural familiarity and distance between Brazil and Southern Italy was approached by me in an intimate short doc from 2016, Vedi Pati e poi muori.

(3) Such digression, included in the film for the purpose of historical contextualisation, is afforded by the knowledgeable team of Ecomuseo Mare Memoria Viva, among which I’d like to thank co-founder Cristina Alga and guest researcher Elena Bellantoni, both of whom were interviewed for the film and gave us unrestricted access to the museum and its archives.

(4) John Grierson, ‘First Principles of Documentary’, in Forayth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary, (London: Collins, 1946), p. 79.

(5) Battaglia’s photos were key in building a powerful narrative of feminine rebellion against the Cosa Nostra from the 1970s onwards. Her archive challenges a culture imbued with death, martyrdom and “the inadequacy of masculine justice,” in the words of philosopher Adrianna Cavarero.

Technical information

Directed by João Pedro Prado
Produced by Elena Mazzoni Wagner, João Pedro Prado, Marcelo Andreatini
Screenplay by Beatriz Krieger, Elena Mazzoni Wagner, João Pedro Prado
Production assistants: Alessio Clicio, Danilo Salvo
Cinematography by João Pedro Prado
Edited by Beatriz Krieger
Sound by Marcelo Andreatini
Music by Etta Scollo
Subtitles by Amélie Richter, Marco Costanzo
Thanks to Helen Hecker
Institutional support: Goethe Institut Palermo, Ecomuseo Mare Memoria Viva, Centro Internazionali di Fotografia