#FILM
“Nica” by Giuditta Vasile (2022)
Nica: in Sicilian, ‘little one’. The protagonists of the play of the same name are a little girl and her father. The dramaturgical action is extinguished in the account of a morning made up of small informalities: gestures, scribbles, sounds, a hide-and-seek of infinite counting.
In a few poetic lines, Giuditta Vasile succeeds in evoking the condition of being of childhood, which is, after all, an age without conditions. A time of life in which the capacity for judgement is second to that of forgiveness and information from the adult world, still indecipherable, blurs. Everything is filtered by the purity that has not yet known sin. And so – faced with a father being loaded into a car by strange people in uniform and with their wrists paired behind their backs – there is nothing left to do but paint a beard on his face and carry on playing.
In a small film in which the verbal is reduced to a sound impression, Giuditta Vasile manages to deal with the fleeting matter of childhood without rhetoric. In her gaze, the adult and the child who was really seem to synthesise: this is undoubtedly the noblest measure in the tale of the early years.
“Shall we play a game?
What game?
I count to a trillion and you hide.”
– Francesco A. Dubini
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