Lo zio di Brooklyn

The first professional feature by the men from Palermo is a Mafia story full of references for cinephiles (from the western to Pasolini) and narrative irregularities, even though there is a story at its heart. The landscape is that of the outskirts of the suburbs of Palermo. Two Mafiosi (played by two dwarfs) ask a sad family only made up of men to receive in secret a ‘boss’ who is returning to Sicily. They have to tell everyone he’s their uncle from America. The man is a frightening sight, thin as a rake and silent. He really seems to come from a long way away, maybe more in time than in distance – zio (uncle) sounds like Dio (God). Between the Mafia wars, preparations are made for a party around a living statue of San Polifemo, whose glass eye is the emblem for the film. Then there are disgusting spooky images, people like larvae, Neapolitan singers, merciless killers, peasants who prostitute their donkeys for obsessive, handicapped porn maniacs: all kinds of remnants of humanity. They live in the landscape of purgatory before it is abolished, before these last people are admitted to paradise. Once they get to paradise, they dance their childlike dance before they are sucked up by a kind of black hole, a place where everything is lost forever.