The Finding

In Sicily there is a word for a buried treasure that cannot be taken without paying: trovatura. It is guarded by spirits, and the price is never money. I grew up with these stories, and with the walls of anatomical ex votos — silver eyes, hands, legs — left in churches by people who had asked for a grace and received it.

This film is built entirely out of those two objects: a thing found in the ground, and a thing offered on a wall. There is no dialogue, because in the world of an ex voto nothing is explained: you see the wound, you see the silver copy of the wound, and you understand the exchange.

I wanted a devil who does not tempt with power but with ordinary things — a full table, a toy town — and who is impeccable, courteous and never dirty. And I wanted the answer to him to be equally material: a woman who gives an eye and sews a body out of the clothes of the dead.

The film was made with generative tools, but not by them. Every frame was directed: lens, light, blocking, continuity. The technology gave a small Sicilian company access to a scale of production it could not otherwise afford. It did not give it a point of view.