In 1961 two young American film-makers, Robert Young and Michael Roemer, Cortile Cascino, visited a slum in Palermo on Sicily. They wanted to record the chronic poverty which existed in these far corners of the ‘developed world’. The film material with which they returned comprised striking black & white footage, shot in an intimate subjective style. They are images which take the viewer along through the suffocating world of slums, crowded alleyways, spiritual healers and busy markets. This documentary, Cortile Cascino, was however never screened because the producers were of the opinion that the portrayal of poverty in the film would be too overwhelming for an American audience.Robert Young: ‘The film was locked up and the original negative destroyed. The story behind the film is long and complicated, but I think it’s a good documentary, and I’m proud of it.’Driven by curiosity about what had happened to the main character in the documentary, Angela, and her family since the Cortile Cascino neighbourhood was flattened in the sixties, Robert Young returned to Sicily in 1988 with his son Andrew Young and daughter-in-law Susan Todd. The result: Children of Fate, the dramatic story of the heroic struggle of a mother to maintain her family in difficult circumstances. Angela is a woman with great courage and perseverance; she has to battle continuously with her husband who abuses her and with a heritage of poverty, violence and crime. In Children of Fate the new material has been juxtaposed with shots from 1961; the film follows three generations of a family doomed to be shaped by the poverty within which they live and from which escape is impossible.
