Michele Panetta’s beautiful docu-fiction focuses on the parallel lives of a young Italian and a Nigerian migrant
The title could allude to mass in the church in which some scenes are set (“Take, eat, this is my body”). But the bodies are more secular in this rather beautiful docu-fictional piece from Italian film-maker Michele Pennetta, a very physical movie about poverty and loneliness, about people whose bodies are perhaps all they have.
Il Mio Corpo returns Pennetta to the Sicilian landscape he has explored in his previous feature Fishing Bodies, from 2016. This time, he has found two different real people in Sicily whose lives he brings together in a kind of diptych. One of them is Oscar, a tough, scrappy, lonely kid who may have been emotionally abused by his father – there is talk of a court case in which the judge heard testimony against Oscar’s father from Oscar himself, which clearly still rankles. Now things have been resolved and Oscar works for his dad in the scrap-metal business, scavenging for discarded old bits and pieces in the burning sun, with his dad yelling at him.