“Quatriglio’s 8mm reels remind us that resilience is part of the human spirit, and just as important a commodity as money or fame.”

Our dearly departed, those who leave us here on earth and move to a different form in another universe, usually require a lot of work after their departure. Relatives, lovers, friends — all will have equally accumulated things throughout their lives, things we need to dispose of when they’re gone. Yet those things also carry their own history and can come together to create a portrait of our loved ones once they are no longer here among us.

That is the basic premise of Costanza Quatriglio’s documentary The Secret Drawer (Il cassetto segreto), which world premieres at this year’s Berlinale in the Forum program. In 2010 the filmmaker, who is known for festival favourites The Island and Terramatta, started filming her famous father, Sicilian journalist and writer Giuseppe Quatriglio. He was known for decades in Italy and abroad for his writing and cultural dispatches on the world, as well as on his native island — his book Mille anni in Sicilia. Dagli arabi ai Borboni is a must-read for anyone who questions the connection between the Arab world and southern Italy. With his camera in tow he travelled the globe and chronicled wars, cultural events, and changing landscapes, whether they be political or natural.

Many of us wish we could have made a film about our own illustrious relatives — if we are lucky enough to have been born into a family with one or two. But Quatriglio actually made that film we usually only dream about, beginning to immortalize her father in his bathrobe, with a handheld camera, as he talked her through his extensive archives housed in two large studies of the family’s ground floor apartment in Palermo.

The Secret Drawer was born as a short film in 2014, while the senior Quatriglio was still alive (he passed away in 2017 at the age of 94). It then became a feature-length documentary during the pandemic, when his only daughter decided to donate all of her father’s books, videos, audio recordings, documents and photographs, plus many of the paintings hanging in the house, to the central library of Sicily. Such an endeavour required days upon days of cataloguing by at least five people, and throughout the work, Costanza was able to recount the story of her beloved, famous father.

While the first half of Quatriglio’s film centres on her father’s indomitable spirit, the second half shows his daughter’s own exuberant joie de vivre, as she plays with her handheld camera, speed talks through anecdotes and short stories about her family, and dances around her father’s study. There, the film takes a turn and becomes more about her own magnificently occupied place in the world and less about her illustrious father.

Told in five chapters which count down backwards, plus an epigraph and a prologue, Quatriglio’s documentary takes us through the history of the 20th Century as well as her own family’s story. We see shots of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz in the 1930s and experience images that could be taken straight out of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. There are videos of Sicily after the earthquake of 1968, which wiped out entire towns; they force us to face the reality of what Gaza must look like today — because Italy, and especially Sicily, has always had a bond with the Holy Land. We also see Sicily through a different set of eyes, away from those who so often portray the illicit dealings of the Mafia and its stronghold on the region. Along with images of her father’s first wife and her own beautiful mother, shot by a man who took photographs of everything, everyone, and at every turn.

It is a welcome change from the usual, this film, and Quatriglio’s 8mm reels featuring Carlo Levi, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Leonardo Sciascia, along with artists and cinema stars like Renato Guttuso, Anna Magnani, Cary Grant, and Ingrid Bergman, remind us that resilience is part of the human spirit, and just as important a commodity as money or fame. And that being a journalist means telling our own stories, in our own voices, away from AI and press releases. Regardless of whether anyone wants to hear those stories in the moment. Because eventually, everything becomes an archive and it is only from our past that we can somehow learn how to navigate our future.

Image copyright: Fondo Giuseppe Quatriglio