I watch him. His brow bone juts out creating a subtle shadow over his teal eyes. Eyes stern and contemplative beyond their years. He speaks passionately and exhaustively with a zealous energy that begs to be understood. Standing at the front of a theater full of journalists and fellow filmmakers, Paulo Parvis has just debuted his first film at the Florence’s Festival dei Pompoli.
A man in the audience a few rows behind me raises his hand and comments about the message of the film. I strain to understand, but can only pick up bits and pieces of his swift Italian sentences. The audience applauds and Paolo bows his head modestly in response.
I didn’t understand it the first time I saw Parvis’s short film, “Schi(z)zo” but I admired the rawness of its depiction. Admirably, from somewhere within himself, he’s been able to harness the courage to strip naked a life that could easily have been hidden by an unwarranted sense of shame.
The documentary begins with the camera set on a winding, darkened set of stairs. Paolo steps from behind the camera and climbs the stairs. The camera remains on the ground floor and the audience is able to overhear, but not see, a conversation he is having with his sister on the upper level of the house. She is apologizing to him for, at times, taking her frustrations out on him. Later I find out that his sister, older than him by 13 years, is a schizophrenic.
As the film proceeds we are toured through this apartment in which the family has lived for thirty years and discover that the home has been recently ravaged by a fire. We are given an intimate view of the bedroom where Paulo and his girlfriend were laying when the blaze began. Piles of old newspapers and close-ups of missing floor tiles give us an idea of the damage caused. ‘I’m laughing to keep from crying’, his sister chuckles from somewhere out of camera shot. ‘I’m ashamed to bring friends to this place’, she says, noticeably frustrated, ‘but I can’t stay alone all the time!’
Fire and smoke, the English subtitles read, is like a punch when inhaled. You just want to run even if you can put it out with water or sand. As Parvis relives the experience for us he shows us his bedroom where white shadows of a life once lived are now scorched onto blackened walls. As the fourteen minute film draws to an end, we watch a graffiti artist transform the walls of the room into artwork. The fire has created on the walls smoky imprints that have an uncanny resemblances to picture frames, as though even amidst its destruction the blaze was expectant of a masterpiece.
Slowly and patiently the artist embeds black and white murals into these silhouette frames. A message of optimism and recreation not to be overlooked: turning even tragedy into art. Frustrated he dwells on an image of Paolo’s late mother, determined to get it perfected. I want to make it bigger, he mutters, but I’m running out of white paint.
After my second viewing of Parvis’s film at Spazio Uno in Florence, I get the opportunity to speak with the 27 year old filmmaker. I ask him what life was like growing up with a sister with schizophrenia. It was difficult, he tells me. He was too young to be able to deal with the reality of his situation. She would wake in the night screaming, he says. Her symptoms progressively escalating, she would cut herself and often suffered from severe depression.
Paolo’s mother died from a rare form of cancer, he later shares with me as we sit on a staircase outside the theater and attempt to delve deeper into the message of his film. He can’t help but believe that stress contributed to her illness. Dealing with the stress of handling a child with schizophrenia in a country where the disease is stigmatized both by the health care system and by the ignorance of society was not easy. Until very recently, Italian laws have allowed for mental health facilities to offer subpar care to poorer patients. The young man stresses this to me several times during our talk. Whereas wealthy patients are able to, in a sense, buy normalcy, poorer patients struggle with finding a way to lead normal lives. There is no focus on helping these patients with the adjustments necessary into order to enter back into mainstream society after they are released from these facilities. And more, there is no understanding, by the public, of people with psychological illnesses.
Much of the inspiration behind the film, according to Parvis, comes from a need to fcreate awareness between the families of the mentally ill. It is an effort to form a supportive network and, at the very least, a message of a shared experience. The family, he adds, is the key to changing the way the patient is understood by clarifying the situation for a stronger starting point in the future. The family unit is the key to begin to form a basis for society’s understanding of mental illness and subsequently improving the overall quality of life for the mentally ill.
As the film closes the graffiti artist is putting finishing touches on a phrase that he has painted on the wall. In a sharply fluid style of lettering that, until then, I would never have imagined a spray-can could accomplish he has scrawled “Remember the light”. Now turn and show me the light of your eyes, Paolo directs…
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