Ettore Majorana

The film is somehow controversial. I understand that touching a figure as Padre Pio in Italy is difficult. I appreciated so much Ferrara’s courage. There are details in the figures delineated with the precision allowed only by great directors. The script is much more profound than what it could seem. It simply derive from the historical observation of facts. In that village, just after the parallel happy-but-painful return of soldiers after WW1 and the happy-but-painful arrival of Padre Pio in the convent, a tragic protofascist event happened. That is not at all the story of Padre Pio. The matter of fact is that although the young monk intends to carry all the pains of the world, he is squeezed by his internal personal experience, besieged by the ghosts of human and personal weakness. In and out. Inside a single individual, perceived as a saint, there might me a civil war, parallel to another war, the one that happens in the social context. The question risen by the script is: where is the saint ? In or out . Cos the spiritual demand individual or can be collective and godless ? Just human ? And that connects to the prior sentence, cited at the beginning. Ferrara is right in saying this is a documentary. In some sense this is a documentary on the nature of human awareness. Of course, this is not a commercial work. It is independent artistic product. I was in pain thinking to the upset souls of Padre Pio “followers”, who wanted to see their hero. This is a different product, but I am sure that at least a few of them, silently, appreciated the Ideep courage and the thought that are underlying. Technically it is excellent, useless to demonstrate it, just few points, but well within the standards of independent film making. I went back to see the movie to refresh an image that chocked me and was fixed in my memory: the hand on the shoulder of the monk, alone, struggled by his own soul. That hand should be that of Christ. Indeed, that hand looks like that of a monster. Where is Christ ? In or out ? This movie is a pray with a great spiritual demand.