Article by Silvia De Gattis

Translation by Giuditta Portaro

The life of little Emilio (Marco Fiore) moves between two different dimensions: on one hand, the concrete everyday life of a child in Fascist Italy in 1936; on the other, the adventures experienced by his hero, Sandokan, in the books his uncle gives him. But what happens when these two dimensions intertwine?

Emilio cautiously wanders into the forest among monkeys and elephants when, all of a sudden, an adult, foreign voice bursts in, immediately placing the child back in the space-time in which the narrative takes place: we are in Italy, in 1936. Emilio is the son of the town mayor (Edoardo Pesce), although he is not exactly a model “balilla” (a genovese patriot). Puny by constitution, clumsy and the object of ridicule from his classmates, he prefers to wander through the pages of Emilio Salgari, immersing himself in distant worlds, rather than learning to shoot a gun with his father. The use of animation to recreate the forest in which Emilio finds himself at the beginning of the film is fundamental: director Giorgia Farina chooses in this way to make visually explicit the encounter-clash between the real world in which Emilio lives and the fantasy world in which he would like to live. Ho visto un re (I Saw a King) is in fact not a realistic film, although inspired by a true story, but maintains fairytale-like tones by choosing, as the director herself states, to tell the facts ‘through the eyes of a child’. The central and structuring core lies in the ability of Emilio’s pure and uncontaminated gaze to transform the reality around him. The arrival in the city of Abraham Imirrù (Gabriel Gougsa), an Ethiopian ras who will be held prisoner in the podesta’s garden inside an aviary – and whom Emilio identifies as Sandokan – constitutes the exact moment when reality and imagination interlock.

If, on one hand, Ho visto un re (I Saw a King) seems to suggest that the world, in order to regenerate itself, must start afresh from the marginalised categories of society – children, women, homosexuals, racialised people – claiming their narrative centrality and point of view, at the same time the fairy-tale context and comic tones mean that the contextualisation of the film in the period of Italian colonialism is a mere choice of narrative characterisation, far from being the focal point of the work. Proof of this is the very figure of Abraham/Sandokan, painfully relegated to the role of hero-saviour.