email print share on Facebook share on Twitter share on LinkedIn share on reddit pin on Pinterest

FILMS Italy

Magic Island: Andrea Schiavelli, his father and Sicily

by 

- Today sees the arrival in theatres of the latest documentary by Marco Amenta, an intimate journey alongside the son of famous and dearly departed Italian-American character actor Vincent Schiavelli

Magic Island: Andrea Schiavelli, his father and Sicily
Andrea Schiavelli in an image from Magic Island

To many, the name Vincent Schiavelli won’t mean much. Yet the face of this Italian-American character actor, who appeared in hundreds of films (including several by Milos Forman) is at once recognisable: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, Ghost, Batman Returns, Larry Flint, and Man on the Moon, to name but a few. An unmistakeable face, the features of which live on in his son Andrea Schiavelli, a 27-year-old musician from New York, at the centre of Magic Island [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, the latest documentary by Palermitan director Marco Amenta, who, after winning the Salina Doc Fest and participating in the Hot Docs International Film Festival of Toronto and the Bellaria Film Festival, hits Italian screens today. 

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Vincent Schiavelli passed away in 2005 at the age of 57, in Sicily, the land of his forefathers, where he had moved to some years previously. A decade on, Andrea, who hadn’t been to Italy since he was a teenager and never said goodbye to his father definitively, received a phone call from that ‘magic island’: there was money in an old bank account of his father that needed collecting. So the young man decides to cross the ocean, aware that this journey would not just be about money for him.

Marco Amenta is with him the whole time, discrete and silent: “It’s as if we embarked on a course of psychoanalysis together, I helped him to explore his state of mourning. I was there but I didn’t interfere, for the first time I worked without pre-established methods”, says the director, who has made a number of documentaries including Il fantasma di Corleone (about mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano) and fictional drama The Sicilian Girl [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
. “This time I wanted to portray a different Sicily. I didn’t want to tell a mafia story”, specifies Amenta, “but a story about emigration, of returning to your roots and forgotten values” From the skyscrapers of the Big Apple, we see Andrea catapulted into the Palermitan hinterland, in Polizzi Generosa, into the midst of old friends of his father and the latter’s last partner Katia, getting to grips with the vegetable garden he accidentally tramples a lettuce in (as a rather ungraceful young man), among plants and laughing, with a feeling of guilt at not having seen his father before he died, and of resentment at having been abandoned to some extent, when Vincent decided to leave the United States to return to the land of his ancestors.

Andrea rediscovers his roots there where his father physically looked for his own, at the cost of losing his son. He forgives him, forgives himself and grows as a person. An intimate journey which Amenta makes us privy to, a genuine slice of life that is in many ways universal. And last but not least, it shows us, through old films, a little-known side of the American actor: his performances as Don Quixote, his passion for cooking, his strange way of speaking Sicilian, a form of dialect from the 19th century which is these days almost incomprehensible. 

Magic Island is produced by Eurofilm and Mediterranea Film Paris with the Sicily Film Commission, in partnership with the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism – Tax Credit and the Ile-de-France region. It will be released on Thursday, 12 January, in Palermo, Milan and Rome, followed by Bologna and Sciacca, by Mediterranea Film.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

(Translated from Italian)

Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.

Privacy Policy