Al Dio ignoto - To the Unknown God

Lucia is a mother who lives alone with her 17-year-old son. Her husband left her after their first daughter, Anna, died of leukemia. Lucia works in a hospice where she befriends a retired professor, Redetti, and patients in palliative care. They are unaware of her personal tragedy but unknowingly become her confidents over time. Lucia soon understands how to live the unliveable life. “It is with this profound awareness that Bisatti sketches the theme of the end of life, setting his work in a hospice in Merano and choosing as protagonists Lucia (Laura Pellicciani), Gabriel's mother as well as a caring nurse who takes in and cares for the terminally ill, and Giulio (Paolo Bonacelli), a former professor of moral philosophy who, between a quote from Giacomo Leopardi and one from Attilio Bertolucci, faces his last days with the spiritual strength of one who has chosen self-determination. All the characters in the film are bound together not only by their work or parental point of view, but by an even thinner thread that serves as the general substratum of existence: the possibility of life and the expectation of death. This is perhaps why Bisatti chooses from time to time, to dwell on the dense natural surroundings, the hum of a bee searching for nectar, the immensity of the starry sky and the woods surrounding the nursing home. Just as is the case with Brueghel's or Bollongier's magnificent still lifes, ready to remind us with the vividness of colors and fruits of the beauty of life and the inevitability of death, the director chooses to show us death only through the counterfield of life, and this choice of perspective is in turn reflected in the reflective rhythm of the narrative, in the choice to punctuate the film with continuous close-ups aimed at highlighting the nuances and emotional struggles that move the protagonists, and in adopting a style somewhere between fiction and a documentary vocation. To the Unknown God is a film made of oxymorons and antitheses, which does not cling to any metaphysical certainty as it prefers to open up to the authentic and difficult experience of care. It is precisely in this triangular relationship between life, care and death that the characters move [...]. From this point of view, the reference to the unknown God of the title, rather than to Nietzsche's famous poem, which is also quoted in the film, seems to refer to a verse from the Acts of the Apostles where it is written, “[the unknown God] whom you worship without knowing, I announce to you.” Far from being a religious work, Bisatti's film is nonetheless a work about proclamation: to represent death is to allow it to emerge as a force at once reassuring and frightening, and its presence does not consist solely, as Bazin wanted, in the obscenity of its representation, but in the delicacy of its proclamation. And it is perhaps from here that works such as To the Unknown God make us rediscover the extra-ordinariness of a life that fades away and, with it, the fullness of feeling alive.” (Alessandro Lanfranchi, on: cineforum.it)