WORD, BODY, CINEMA Fronte-O-Spizio
Why do young people, adolescents with troubling, often anxiety-inducing, personal problems that beleaguer them, shutting them into pits of solitude and despair, decide, under the guide of a psychotherapist who’s part idealist and part philosopher, to group together and to call this group “Fronte-O-Spizio” (“Frontispiece”)?
The answer, the origin of the answer, lies in three words.
FRONTE: viewed as a wartime front, a line of battle against the enemy of inner darkness.
OSPIZIO: hospice, viewed as a refuge, a place where each person is welcomed and hosted and listened to and understood.
FRONTESPIZIO: viewed as a self-presentation, like the frontispiece in a book is a brief yet full presentation of what the book contains.
Three words that played with one another, nestled together – Fronte-O-Spizio – cared about one another and conceived another and different meaning, more complex and expressive; an “other” meaning that is also the signpost of a route, denomination of a project whose final aim coincides with another word, noble and profound: Freedom. Freedom from solitude, from fear; freedom to express oneself, to communicate and therefore to meet with others, free from traumas or complexes. Freedom to live fully and serenely.
At first the group used spoken words: monologue that turned into dialogue, verbal communication that led to mutual knowledge and thence to empathy, free of judgments or prejudices.
Then the spoken work became the written. Words that remain because they are impressed on paper, offered for reading – for discovery and comprehension – even to those outside the group. Printed words in a book (a lovely book) offered to the world, perhaps precisely that world that seemed to reject you and that now is invited to know you and therefore to welcome you.
And then another step, another challenge, intellectual and cultural, artistic in fact. Those words, deriving from inner suffering, dramatic and painful, a mute cry for help, want to take on “body” and image. How? Offering themselves to the oldest expressive language created by mankind, theater, and at the same time to the most modern and powerful: film.
And so the words written by the Fronte-O-Spizio kids were offered to students at the MAT (Ticino Artistic Movement) drama school and to the mimes of the Sugo d’Inchiostro group, who made them their own, reinterpreted them and transformed them into two plays, while young filmmaker Olmo Cerri followed the group with his camera, filming its life, interviewing its members and taking to the screen – with extreme sensitivity and authentic emotion – the soul of the group and flashes of individual spirits.
The Fronte-O-Spizio kids saw the plays and the film. And they recognized themselves in them. They discovered themselves to be the inspirations and co-authors of works of art. Now they are really out of the pit. Now they can continue to make their way through the world and through life. As protagonists.
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