AL DIO IGNOTO endorsed by The Vatican
AL DIO IGNOTO - To The Unknown God
DIRECTOR: Rodolfo Bisatti
CAST:: Paolo Bonacelli, Laura Pellicciari, Krista Posch, Francesco Cerutti
PRODUCERS: Laura Pellicciari, Kevin Granahan, Rene Asch
One of many TV and Publication reviews:
National review by Vittorio Lingiardi - 17th of July 2020 - Il Venerdì di Repubblica
The archaic setting of a domestic ceremony showing hands of pain dig a small garden pit in which a birthday cake with burning candles is placed. A ritual celebrating memories of the daughter who succumbed to leukaemia seven years earlier. Lucia the mother officiates over this rite, an "orphan" to her daughter since there are no words to name a parent who loses her child. Lucia is Demeter, the earth’s goddess that tirelessly cries out her loss for Persephone, swallowed up by the dark underworld. I now leave the Homeric myth, so much loved by Jung, on its pagan path putting back together the mother-daughter relationship in a seasonal union: six months to fruitful spring flowering and six months of the bare winter underworld. But since I’ve watched it on Chili “To the unknown God” I kept thinking about that myth. This film, by Olmi's close confidant and collaborator Rodolfo Bisatti, it’s dedicated not only to the elaboration of mourning but also to our social and psychological need of building death’s awareness. Daring work, “To the unknown God” was chosen, with other films, by the Catholic Association of Cinema Operators (ACEC), in collaboration with Filmcronache, for the imminent, series of screenings “Oltre la notte”. Bisatti tells us about death, handing us over to various ways of life: Lucia’s family emotional break up; the mountain silence; the human souls and words of patients residing in a hospice where Lucia works in order to save and torment herself; the palliative care of patients and their medical value. Bisatti shows us the dying as a knowledged source and as a life’s teacher without any necrophiliac morbidity but actually with the most peaceful lightness. He shows us death as the great meeting with that "unknown God" (from the verse of a Nietzsche poem) to which - believers and non-believers – all of us consecrate at the altar