PUPUS

Logline
In a small theater there is a child who’s never tired of playing with puppets. He creates stories that he recites in whispers, surrounded by the silence of an audience filled by his imagination.
Synopsis
Borgo Vecchio, Palermo: we are in the great universe of the Puppets’ Opera from the Sicilian tradition, we are in the small theater-laboratory of the Mancuso family. Carmelo, son of a master puppeteer, lives in this place full of fantasy and imagination. He plays with the verses he has heard so many times during the shows: trying to imitate the grown-up tone of his father's voice, he gives life to the puppets with arcane dexterity. His eyes shine in that fairy tales’ world, where raw pieces of wood take shape to narrate, as in an eternal return, the chivalrous stories of love and war. Here’s how a young man just at the beginning of a great knowledge makes his way towards his future.
Director Notes
Pupus is an observational documentary investigating the father-son relationship during the process of transmission of an art. Starting from a solitary game, typical of the childish need to live in a fantasy world, an ancient knowledge can lead to an actual profession. The documentary shows the daily life of a family portrait where the symbolic-cultural values of traditions encounters the present, looking towards a future still uncertain. The relationship with the protagonists was built through a year of exchange and mutual trust carried on even during the quarantine.