Films

This film tells the story of the friendship between an English filmmaker and Nicola, a Sicilian ex-gangster who lives in Florence. The film moves to and fro between a street of ill repute, and the training of medieval football, which Nicola plays. However, by the end of the Autumn, Nicola’s situation has deteriorated – both on the football field and in the street.

"I shot more than seventy hours of non-digital tape over a period of eighteen month which, as well as enabling to cut a film that was broadcast by ARTE, also provided the source material for my Ph.D on Masculinity Among a Group of Petty Criminals in a Florentine Street. However, despite the title, the majority of the criminals that I studied were Sicilian, and it is likely that both directly and indirectly and one way and another, most of them will have had some connection with their local Mafia in Sicily. Theirs was a constant competition for masculine status: outside this milieu no one had any interest in them at all, but within the group they used their masculinity to achieve status in a situation where they had nothing else to play with. For further information on this study please refer to my PhD thesis, held both in Senate House and the Royal Anthropological Institute. I also write about my reseach, my filmed material, and my film My Eyes As a Stranger in my book A Filmmaker’s Odyssey, published by Intervention Press in 2014." Toni de Bromhead