Berlinale 74, Forum section. Sometimes we still discover small gems, and Costanza Quatriglio certainly offers us one. The Italian director made her debut in 2003 at the Director’s Fortnight of the 56th edition of the Cannes Film Festival with “L’Isola,” and from then on, she dedicated herself to fiction and documentary filmmaking, until arriving in 2024 with a documentary work that is the result of a long genesis, probably lasting as long as her own life. The Secret Drawer reconstructs with the use of archival material the story of her father, Giuseppe Quatriglio, a Sicilian journalist and writer, as well as a historian and photographer, an eclectic personality who actively participated in the Sicilian intellectual world, particularly fervent in the second half of the 20th century.
But it is not only about describing a successful professional life and personal life, it is much more.
Starting from the discovery of over 60,000 photographic negatives in her father’s studio, taken from 1947 onwards, dozens of 8mm films, and hundreds of hours of audio recordings, the film is in a way a historical mosaic of events and lives intertwined with that of Quatriglio Sr. and that of the director herself.
Encounters, opinions, interviews, thoughts, memories, letters and postcards bring to life fantastic characters who enriched the last century: Enrico Fermi, Carlo Levi, Jean-Paul Sartre, Anna Magnani, Leonardo Sciascia, Renato Guttuso, Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Winston Churchill, and many more – fleeting or enduring encounters- all contributed, along with family affections, loves, and old parents, to shaping a man whose entire life story is presented to us. Them and the books.
Hundreds and hundreds of books fill the old Sicilian house where the director returns when she decides to donate all her father’s cultural material, including photographs, film rolls, films, and recordings, to the Sicilian Region. Consequentially, Costanza Quatriglio’s childhood home becomes the setting for a personal and universal, historical and human narrative that starts from the bookshelves – from the “secret drawer” opened and emptied because the need to tell has become imperative – and branches out into an even broader discourse.
The relationship between memory and absence, between past and present.
The testimony of Giuseppe Quatriglio’s life occurs through images and words, his culture and therefore his sentimental education are somehow contained in these, as they are in the infinite volumes of the library.
Both undergo the same process of becoming archives. His impressive library, because – as shown in the film – it gets cataloged and donated to the Sicilian Region – and his life, as the shreds of his memories are selected and put back together by the editing to become a preserved tale.
Both are an attempt to bring order to disorder, to encapsulate a thousand experiences and lived lives into something organized according to a discourse, whether it be a work of art like a film or a library shelf from which one day a young person will pick out a page to read.
For this reason, as much as The Secret Drawer is obviously about the past, it is actually intrinsically linked to the future.
The director alternates between immersing in her father’s life and showing the process of archiving his memories. A process that may seem dusty and stale at first glance, but is entirely oriented towards the future, for the future generations who will still be able to enjoy the cultural legacy of those who have passed away. Because if men die, their gaze must not die, whether expressed through poems, articles, photographs, or simple sounds.
Therefore, Costanza Quatriglio’s work is absolutely transversal and all-encompassing.
Using the same investigative method as her father, she not only delves into the depth of an entire existence, not only examines her own affections, emotional heritage, and cultural roots, not only brings an entire era and a thousand different places back to life (from Sicily to Paris, from Berlin to the United States, and so forth), but also pays homage to the power of the archive and the beauty of preservation.
A film like this is particularly urgent today. The risk of the digital age is to forget materiality. Paper is the material on which much of our thought has been preserved, and film came after, preserving much of our collective imagery. These must receive the care and attention that would be devoted to an oil painting or an ancient marble statue.
If we consider that the great masterpieces of history have reached us on fragile materials, claiming eternal pretensions like any declaration – artistic, religious, or political – but have been entrusted to something inherently designed to self-destruct in a short time, we understand even more the value of passing down. People who came before us had to trust that someone would take care to keep printing a book, to faithfully restore a painting. In the digital age, everything has changed, we do not know if for better or for worse, but everything has changed.
But we must not forget how we got here, nor forget how much material still surrounds us. Material that cries beauty, that cries to be observed. Like those graffiti made on the wall by prisoners of the Spanish Inquisition in Palermo, in the Prisons of Chiaromonte, and discovered thanks to Giuseppe Quatriglio in 1964.
Therefore, the director’s work is not just a powerfully personal film, secularly spiritual and a tribute to the power of culture and preservation, but a film about choice.
The past is an unstoppable river that overwhelms us if we open the door and abandons us if we close it. They are “old and new cities, exposed and expugnable, like Thebes – The City of 100 Gates, or like all the cities that we don’t see and yet they exist, above and below us”.
We can choose to keep the door closed – those cities will still exist – or we can choose to open it, through the infinite getaways that have been passed down to us. It’s called knowledge.
We can choose to let ourselves be overwhelmed and slowly learn to navigate it. No one is an expert traveler, but what matters is to be travelers.
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