BY AN UNRECEIVED GRACE

“By an unreceived grace ” is the story of the slow, surreal, picaresque journey of two artists, Giovanna Maria Boscani and Joe Perrino. Together, they explore the Sardinia on a small three-wheeled car. Starting from Sardinia’s southernmost prison, the Uta Penitentiary, the journey of Giovanna and Joe includes all the jails on the island. Their inmates will give to the artists their request for a “pardon” in the form of an ex-voto – drawings, writings, objects – that will decorate the small car. The car itself, thus, is transformed by Giovanna Maria Boscani into a traveling art installation.
Following this line of thought, the idea of breaking the isolation of the prisons is developed through an almost surreal adventure that joins together the institutions of punishment through art and music.
Through the artist's work, the car becomes a symbolic and fantastic element that presents itself as a medium of relationship between artistic practice and prison experience.
“By an unreceived grace” is not a socio-anthropological investigation, but a sounding board for stories, desires, ambitions, dreams that would otherwise remain locked up within the walls of the penal institutions. The film’s style is closer to narrative cinema than documentaries. It lacks interviews or a narrator and only focuses on dialogues: conversations between the two protagonists and the people they
meet on their journey.
“By an unreceived grace” will not spring from a traditional script, but from the prisoners’ stories and the ones of their family members, which will intersect and define the structure of the narrative.
Giovanna and Joe undertake a journey on an old fashioned vehicle that, not being able enter fast flowing highways, forces them to travel on secondary roads. Joe, used to traveling rough thanks to his many musical tours, will soon begin to be afflicted by the fatigue, the boredom and the excessive noise of the small car. Even Giovanna will try to endure the same hardships, but will try to hide it, since she is the one
who chose such an old and inadequate vehicle; she also knows that Joe does not like driving and he is not willing to take the wheel. Their journey is punctuated with short breaks and breathtaking views. And so on, from prison to prison.
The prisoners and their relatives will be directly involved in the decoration of the vehicle: they will be asked to donate their personal interpretation of an ex-voto; from the hands of the inmate who created it, according to his own free expression, the ex-voto reaches the hands of Giovanna Maria Boscani, who carries it over the walls of the prison and places it in the car, making it part of her "pilgrimage". Thus, the prisoners become an active part of a creative process that will see them as protagonists of their troubles and visions. The small car, through this process, goes beyond the common concept of “art installation”, becoming the stage of the actors’ performance, which will constitute the main focus of this documentary film.