"I wanted to make known the Comunità del Sole, which my wife Clara Sereni and I founded to promote projects involving disabled people. I shot the film over two years, on weekends: there is life in the farmhouses, but also my own life, Clara's, and our son's. That part took over: it became a private diary (...) The film, starting as an experience that might have meant something to my family and me, became something more universal: a view from the inside of a 'particular family.'"
With these words, director Stefano Rulli introduces his film, which we strongly urge our readers to see—perhaps tracking down a copy on videocassette or DVD.
It is a story captured as it unfolds, in the place where it happens, with subjects who do not act or narrate but live the events of their lives. Through celebrations at the farmhouses, gatherings with friends, a wedding, evenings by the fireplace with songs and glasses of wine, the story of Matteo emerges—the director's son, who has a psychic disability. We encounter other young people like him, and here Matteo becomes the image of all of them. Matteo tells us of silence and unease, of suffering and restlessness, of anxiety in relationships, of rejecting contact and searching for it, of violent gestures and the pain that follows them—experiences common to all of them. In the same way, his father and mother, through how they stand by him, through what they do and say and think, are unforgettable witnesses to countless parents fighting the same battle.
What is this "particular silence"? Is it perhaps Matteo's, alone and shut away in his father's car during the party? Or the silence that rises from the Umbrian hills toward evening when everyone has gone home? Is it what descends between the parents after a difficult day? Is it what wraps around us as we leave at the end of the film?
Tea Cabras, 2005