19/01/2024 - The Italian director’s new documentary will enjoy its world premiere in the German festival’s Forum section

By way of a sentimental tale where personal memory and collective memory come together in an intense dialogue between presence and absence, reaching across Sicily, Europe and the wider world from the walls of a single home and spanning a century’s worth of history, Costanza Quatriglio has opened the lid on the life of her father Giuseppe Quatriglio, a well-known journalist and “indefatigable researcher into all things Sicilian” (as his friend Leonardo Sciascia described him). Ready and waiting to discover what the filmmaker unearthed are the audience members of the 74th Berlin Film Festival, where The Secret Drawer [+see also:
film review
interview: Costanza Quatriglio
film profile] - the new documentary by the director behind Terramatta [+see also:
trailer
interview: Costanza Quatriglio
film profile] (presented in the Giornate degli Autori line-up in Venice 2012 and awarded the 2013 Nastro d'Argento), Triangle [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (awarded 2015’s Nastro d'Argento) and Just Like My Son [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Costanza Quatriglio
film profile] (screened out of competition in Locarno 2018) - is set to be presented in the Forum section.

In January 2022, Costanza Quatriglio returned to the home in which she was raised, which had been closed up for some time, and opened the doors to archivists and librarians in order to donate the world of knowledge which once belonged to her journalist father to the Region of Sicily. In other words, the library and archive of Giuseppe Quatriglio, a long-time journalist at the Giornale di Sicilia and other important newspapers, and a writer, essayist and friend of 20th century men of culture. Thus begins a sentimental journey through photographs, 8mm film reels, sound recordings made by her father from the ‘40s onwards in Europe and throughout the world, and film footage of her father shot by the director between 2010 and 2011 when he was almost ninety. We discover the memories of a father and a little girl, but also the unexpected voice of Carlo Levi, the memories of Jean Paul Sartre, and a close friendship with Leonardo Sciascia. Then there are photos of Anna Magnani, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, the failed auto shot with Enrico Fermi, that picture by Renato Guttuso and afternoons spent with poet Ignazio Buttitta. Not to mention the earthquake in Belice and the Berlin Wall, Paris and 1950s America.

“The discovery of over 60 thousand negatives of photos taken by my father from 1947 onwards, dozens of 8mm reels and hundreds of hours of sound recordings, helped me to understand that I’d been given an extraordinary opportunity to make a film revolving around a tangle of events and lives which have echoes in our wider history”, Quatriglio explains. “In this sense, the house I grew up in became the setting for a segmented personal story which stretched from the walls of our home to embrace Sicily, Europe and the wider world. In the same way that I rediscovered my own sentimental education while following in his tracks, bringing the world of film into my home helped to transform me and helped me to fully understand the time that had passed”.

The Secret Drawer is produced by Indyca and Luce Cinecittà together with RAI Cinema, in co-production with Rough Cat and RSI Radiotelevisione Svizzera, with support from the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Film and Audiovisual Department, and with backing from the Sicily Region, the Sicilia Film Commission and the Film Commission Torino Piemonte. The story and screenplay come courtesy of Costanza Quatriglio, while photography is entrusted to Sabrina Varani, editing to Letizia Caudullo and music to Giovanni Di Giandomenico. The movie will be released in Italy shortly via Luce Cinecittà.

(Translated from Italian)