The shots of the orange pickers next to the basket of unsold fruit are reminiscent of Tina Modotti, of Walker Evans, in other words of the great social photography of the twenties and thirties. And after these first images, the traveler from the north or from America, who visits his mother after years of absence, boards the train, and the film travels into the heart of Sicily, which could just as well be the heart of Germany or Persia, but is definitely our heart. Sicilia! is a condensation, not an abridgement, of a novel by Elio Vittorini from the late 1930s, in which he dreamily, yet laconically and humorously describes his return to Sicily. Straub/Huillet follow their monolithic life project, conceiving their actors in a Brechtian sense as reciting bodies that call out rhythmically composed dialogues to each other. Unrivalled: the almost Dadaist sequence of dialogues between the traveller and the local scissor grinder, who does not grind scissors.

Loan of the film print with kind support of DFF