Lux Santa

Crotone, small town in southern Italy, about 70 thousand inhabitants. Every 13th December on the silent background of the sky and the sea, groups of young people honor the tradition of the fires of Saint Lucia by building and burning majestic wooden pyramids. Popular legend has it that Saint Lucia was blind. The paintings portray her looking lost in space and holding a silver plate with her eyes on it. Therefore, the ritual, in the town, does not derive only from a banal tradition, but has the intent to return through fire the light (lux) to Saint Lucia in his day. To move the story will be the group of boys from the Fondo Gesù district who in their days, through the streets of the city in search of wood, deal with their personal problems of family life. Boys who at the age of 15 find themselves living without their fathers and are forced to be husbands, feeling the insurmountable weight of the loss of adolescence. There are those who deal with a father in prison, who has never known him or who, soon after, will lose him. A rite that of the Fires of Saint Lucia that unites them as brothers in pursuing a single objective: to realize the tallest and most imposing structure of the city. The majestic pyramid that burns helps them to find, in addition to lost youth, also the "lux" in their dark lives.