Italian-Io Non Ho Paura

The Italian film Io Non Ho Paura (I’m not Scared) by Gabriele Salvatores is about a young boy, Michele, living in an imaginary small town in Italy, who stumbles upon a dark secret that leaves him stranded between the adult world and the innocence of the child world. He is the only young one who knows about the secret that the whole rest of the town has kept hidden until now and it falls upon him to leave his innocence behind and act as an adult. His life style before the discovery of the kidnapped, hostage boy, named Fillipo, was relatively with few worries and restrainments: be home for dinner, take care of your sister and respect your parents’ wishes. Most of his time was spent in the sunny fields on the outskirts of town playing with friends, which is where he found the boy.

Instead of telling his parents like any normal child with a night terror, he kept it to himself and went back to explore, showing that he was tough to begin with. And as a kid it took him a while to find out what he was really dealing with and the severity of the situation.Rather than calling the police or trying to tell someone, he took it upon himself to feed and entertain the boy, promising to come back the next day instead of working on setting him free.

When Fillipo is found and gets out of the hole for the first time there is still innocence in him, even after all he’s been through, as they do not run and try to escape but play in the fields. At the beginning he was convinced he was dead (and most likely not too far away due to neglect) but somehow recovered psychologically from possibly months of alienation and abuse. From the dirty, half-dead prisoner he emerges from his hole in clean white robes and looks at the sun for the first time in ages, smiling.

Another instance where we can see Michele’s childhood regained is the way he narrates his situation. Under the cover of his blanket, he creates stories by night of the origin of the boy, one of him being a lost prince who needs to be brought back to his kingdom. He even trades a small toy car for the trust of a fellow troublemaking boy for the huge responsibility of keeping this a secret from the now violent townspeople. We can see that he feels alienated playing with his friends now, knowing this secret and keeping it to himself, and is distressed when it creates no reaction in his friend.

Not only can also see a loss of trust in his playmates, especially after the boy he entrusted with the secret rats him out, but we can see him becoming cold towards the adults, but never his parents. He still obeys them like any child would even when he discovers they are behind the kidnapping. At the end he runs to his dad even though he knows well enough his intentions are to murder his friend. A child will always see their parents as a safe place even though they may do terrible things at times and that is shown in this film. Even though the loss of innocence was great, he still remained more or less a child.