Like On My Skin, Prophets also talk about a captive human being, a journalist captured by ISIS and confined to a house. Alessio Cremonini moves to the Middle East and talks about the coexistence between two women, between psychological violence and fundamentalism.
Four years after the beautiful On my skinchronicle of the last week of the life of Stefano Cucchi, Alessio Cremonini go back to talking about prisons. In his second film titled Prophets, however, we are not in the Regina Coeli penitentiary in Rome but in the Middle East, in an Islamic State training camp. And in the training camp there are no bars, warders, fresh air and violent quarrels between prisoners, but only a house not too run down, and in the house there is a woman named No. No she is the wife of a mujahideen and becomes the jailer of a western journalist (Will be) who had the misfortune of being caught doing her job.
By staging the confrontation between these two women, the director of borderas well as the co-writer of Private, therefore, wonders, once again, why man, men, a state or an entire society have the irresistible impulse to subdue who is other than himself, what is not known. The answer to such a question is certainly fear, not only of a different religious belief but also of the creature born from Adam’s rib: the woman. And the woman scares because she embodies the mystery of creation, and to the rationality and practicality of the masculine she opposes the sweetness, the complexity, the intuition, the sensuality.
As for the movie on Cucchionce again the task was not easy for Cremoniniwho watched, with curiosity, numerous videos of the so-called wives of ISIS and who, instead of flaunting an idea or imposing his judgment as others would have done, has provided a possible interpretation key to the viewer, creating, for those who will know seize it, a parallel between the “prison” of Prophets and psychological prisons, those “built” by those who pretend to love and those self-imposed, even in families and couples, by those who are too weak to escape. It is clear that at the basis of the film there is a desire to investigate and therefore to show how far a religion can go which in Arabic means “surrendering oneself to the divine will”, but Prophets it goes much further. Indeed, the film reflects on the distance between faith, which means believing in a God who has never been seen, and its denial in the name of a religion of facts, of a trust in the human intellect which does not exclude a priori spirituality but which more often tends to consider the evolution of thought as the only heritage that man leaves to posterity.
Will be he believes in his work, he identifies with his work, but he is weak compared to No, because its certainties are not as granite, and after all the philosophers have taught us that the wise man is the one who doubts. Unfortunately, however, certainty wins between doubt and certainty, and the signs of defeat are visible in the dull pain and sobs of Will be.
Choose the unit of place Alessio Cremonini in Prophetsmaking the house of No another character in the film and at the same time the stage of a theater where, with small variations, the same show is always staged. At the center of the stage there is a double bed, which the two protagonists share, as if they were school friends who have organized a pajama party. One even eats chocolate. But there is no friendship between the women dressed in black, between the two female soldiers who don’t fight on equal terms. Between them it is trench warfare, and mental space is conquered by the strongest through blackmail, silence and passive resistance. It’s a painful show to watch, and it wouldn’t be as emotionally effective if it weren’t for two super-fine actresses to perform: Jasmin Trincaformerly directed by Cremonini in On my skinAnd Isabella Nefar. The director worked with each of them separately to accentuate the gap between Will be And Nocausing the Trinca wore pain painted on a tired face and that his body gave the impression of shrinking, ready to implode. From the Nepharinstead, Cremonini he obtained solemnity and coldness, little expressiveness and therefore lack of humanity.
Alessio Cremonini he says that Prophets women liked it more than men. That’s okay, indeed it’s perfectly fine, because women know what it means to still have to fight to be considered equal to men and they know all too well the sneaky ways of psychological violence, which doesn’t leave scars on the body like the physical one but wounds in the soul. And these wounds, instead of healing, continue to bleed. The director is still convinced that it will be women who will free the world from aggression and the desire to overwhelm, and that theirs will be a battle made up of tenderness, empathy and acceptance. Our hope is that he’s right.