Il Mio Corpo
Director: Michele Pennetta
How do you get inside the mind of any teenage boy, let alone one adrift at the margins of the world’s economy? Michele Pennetta’s docu-drama Il Mio Corpo follows the precarious existence of two such youths. Young teenager Oscar (above) leads a hand-to-mouth life with his father and older brother scavenging Sicily’s illegal rubbish dumps for scrap metal. Stanley (inset), a young Nigerian migrant with a two-year visa, cleans the local church in return for groceries, and shares his tiny flat with a compatriot, Blossom, who awaits the outcome of his asylum application.
Although the presence of a documentary camera is never acknowledged, the film has moments that have clearly been scripted. The editing then shapes the footage into a story by creating parallels between two otherwise unconnected lives.