Film Story

Presented at 5th World Congress of the World Association of Cultural Psychiatry, Columbia University NYC 2018.

The palio of Siena is rich in contamination between religious beliefs, aggregative values, strong passions that cross the social group in dynamics of cohesion and rivalry and contribute to structuring the life of the individual. The festival is part of a solidly formalized social structure: the city is divided into neighborhoods, whose boundaries have been the same for many centuries, and are the centers of social life throughout the year and within which the main passages of the life cycle of the pepole take place. In the Palio many cultural plans intersect: some apparently folkloric (residual), others specific to religious rituals of Western culture. The actors easily pass from one cultural register to another, from religious devotion to the profane feast, since the social structure is flexibly steeped with both aspects. An engine of meaning allows to continuously renew the emotional experience of the subjects in a common indentitarian environment, coexistence between ancient and contemporary, sacred images and profane passions. An involvement in different conceptions of the supernatural disables the double register of relationship with the external world which, in other situations, leads to the divergence of states of conscience suitable to involve ordinary or extramundane facts.

Credits:
Translation and voice off: Jeff Shapiro
Additional shooting: Walter Bonino, Moviement HD
Music: Francesco Oliveto