Libera Nos

Director's Statement

My first aim was to find stories for a film about obsessions, a sort of a journey through mental addictions. What I didn’t expect was to stumble on a discovery even crazier than my already crazy expectations. A training course for exorcist priests organized by the Catholic church. And Sicily with its 20 exorcists represents, together with Lombardy, the most important forefront for this practice. That became the starting point of our long research, during which we took part in lots of deliverance masses, a very particular kind of mass that happens weekly, lasts three hours at least and in which God is begged for a collective deliverance from evil as a first step to private exorcisms.

A strange post-modern puzzle was taking shape in my mind in which the Catholic church was proposing again the ancient and extreme ritual of the exorcism as a new way of social assistance for some typical contemporary malaise. The practice has become so widely diffused that it has become necessary to organize trainings for priests, including lessons about psychiatry, youth trends, satanic cults and the different kinds of drugs used in clubs or during black masses. The exorcist as a modern healer is often considered the last resort after “stations of the cross” full of wizards, psychiatrists, medical specialists and alternative cures. He becomes a metaphor of a society where the search of meaning becomes spasmodic like a quick, efficient and permanent cure, even if it means to give yourself over to someone who will call you Satan.

Slowly I realized that this reality, distant as it was to me, was an extraordinary key to an incendiary state of mind, where the boundaries between lucidity and dissociation are getting thinner. The fundamental question is not whether Satan exists, but how it is possible that exorcisms could become weekly appointments, a precise ritual with disturbing aspects, and also something that can be integrated by everyone with their personal strategies, in everyday life. Possession and deliverance are part of a story about a continuous entering and exiting of certain states within yourself.

The film’s structure runs the gamut from moments of everyday life to clearly abnormal situations. The grotesque peaks come out naturally, but I believe we have managed to maintain proper discretion and respect towards things that remain unknown and towards those who deeply touch the spirituality of some people.

I chose to tell this story from the persective of the people who experience it every day. Not only the “possessed” but also the priests who don’t choose to become exorcists, since they are nominated by their bishops. They nevertheless take this position with faith and completely transform their lives, being “under siege” night and day. Father Cataldo is the symbol of complete devotion joined to a disarming spontaneity and frankness. On the other hand, there are the so-called possessed who are not catholic fanatics, but common people who move closer to the church in a particularly difficult moment in their life. Through their experience, they emancipate themselves from an imaginary horror, acquiring an original complexity made of doubts, misinterpretations, but also of an unlimited sense of self-irony.