Perennially hungry for life, Ferdinando Scianna is now a gentleman in his eighties, with a vibrant mind full of incredible stories. He even has had a few brushes with death.
Being let into his life means retracing an existence marked by encounters with some of the giants of twentieth-century culture, interwoven with friendships and questions about the meaning of photography as a practice, the significance that producing images can still have today.
Scianna upholds the specificity of photography, freeing it from being an art form. It’s something else, he says. He attributes to it the irreplaceable function of probing reality, in an age when images seem to conceal more than reveal, and reality seems on the verge of disappearing.
Fascinating speaker, Scianna — irresistible. We’ll see him in action during a trip to Bagheria, as he visits old friends he photographed in his youth and wants to photograph again.
We’ll see him search for traces of Leonardo Sciascia in his home in Palermo.
We’ll see him in Milan, as he unspools the thread of his life to tell us about it, seeking to convey that special something that makes photography a wonderful adventure and a destiny.

DIRECTOR'S NOTES:
As a child, seemed an inscrutable place in its chaotic contradictions. Too much light, and then too much shadow. It was difficult to take stock, impossible not to feel disoriented.
I began to reflect on the chaos that surrounded me through the words of Sicilian writers, Leonardo Sciascia above all. At the same time, I discovered the photographs of great Sicilian photographers, especially Scianna’s.
This film is a way of acknowledging the scope of that influence, where the eye, the heart and the mind come together as one — as photography always demands. It is rare to find a photographer who has expressed photography’s profound tensions with as much intensity as Ferdinando. And who has also told his story through writing, in an ongoing dialogue with great literature.
Raised in a culture where the photographer was “someone who kills the living and resurrects the dead”, Scianna belongs to the category of photographerstorytellers. Looking at his work, one has the impression of reading a great novel, with places, faces, and voices of the world coming straight out of it. A novel that celebrates human dignity and contradiction. A novel built on light, coming from shadow.