Crossing the dragon

2024, film, group home "L'Approdo", Rome, Italy

In a travertine quarry, the search for a mythological figure intertwines with the traces left by its passage. The dragon is stripped of the stereotypes of threatening danger, shifting the fairy tale into a background that eludes, leaps, and dances between reality and fiction. Without declaring the biographies shaped by postcolonial migration, which marks the protagonists, a game of metamorphosis unfolds.

The image

Young people with a recent migratory past play at reinterpreting the fairy tale "Uccisione del drago" by Dino Buzzati. The foster home where they live and the places they frequent alternate with situations in a travertine quarry. The voices of the participants punctuate the silent images, blending their biographies with a new fairy tale.

The research

Crossing the Dragon is a film born from a collaboration between the artistic duo UCCI UCCI and the young residents of L’Approdo, a family home run by the Spes Contra Spem cooperative in the outskirts of Rome. Through creative workshops and experimental imagination practices, the participants actively engaged in every stage of the project from storytelling and costume design to filming. Starting from Dino Buzzati’s fairy tale The Slaying of the Dragon, the young creators transformed the original narrative into a personal and contemporary story, reshaping its meaning to express their own life experiences and worldview. Set between the symbolic white travertine quarries of Guidonia and meaningful locations in their neighborhood, the film moves through dreamlike, suspended atmospheres. At its heart lies the complex dynamic between prey and predator, offering a symbolic lens through which to explore the role and construction of the “enemy.” The dragon, initially perceived as a threat, becomes a mirror: a misunderstood creature burdened with projections and fear. Through this symbolic and archetypal language, the protagonists recognize themselves in the figure of the dragon: as he are distant and feared. The myth is a metaphor of their condition, judged by voices and prejudices. The result is a collective story in which fiction and autobiography, myth and memory are intertwined in a powerful act of self-representation.

Credits