A Black Jesus review – religious rites and refugees collide in Sicilian village – The Guardian

‘Let us in, we’re poor pilgrims drained from a protracted journey.” Joseph, Mary and Jesus are the unique spurned refugees in a nativity re-enactment within the Sicilian village of Siculiana, which two millennia on from biblical instances is now on the frontline for receiving these fleeing oppression and poverty in Africa. However there’s a paradox on this village of 4,500: whereas some residents marketing campaign towards the native refugee centre and greet the arrivals with racism, the Jesus icon commemorated at a pageant right here every year is (as per this movie’s title) black.

Solely the Africans level out this contradiction on this radiantly photographed and thorough documentary by director Luca Lucchesi, whose father is from Siculiana; it’s also produced by Wim Wenders. But when irony isn’t the native speciality, there are causes for the shortage of self-awareness. The village, like a lot of rural Europe, is economically struggling, and the residents need to preserve what they’ve. They cling to their non secular ceremony, carrying the crucifix via the streets, like an identitarian lifeboat in these stormy waters. “Italy is completed,” bemoans one old-timer, who himself left Sicily as a younger man to work on German building websites. One more irony: in its apparently terminal decline, Siculiana stands to learn from the newcomers’ enter and power.

With the assistance of a sympathetic language instructor, one refugee known as Peter resolves to tug Siculiana down the trail of integration by making use of to be a porter for the icon in the course of the pageant. Like this instructor pep-talking some embarrassed-looking Italian schoolkids about letting go of their prejudices, this late storyline is aiming for an uplifting multicultural denouement – and momentarily seems to get it, as Africans assist hoist the sculpture. It’s a actually shifting second however, after disappointment shortly follows, one which reveals the fragility of symbolic gestures. With Siculiana’s latest residents going through a troubling future, and the locals’ obvious complicity, the phrases of 1 lady reverberate on: “Jesus grew to become black due to all of our sins.”

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