CPH:DOX 2025: The Castle (dirs. Danny Biancardi, Virginia Nardelli, and Stefano La Rosa) | Review
Through the eyes of three children, Danny Biancardi, Virginia Nardelli, and Stefano La Rosa paint a portrait of a struggling neighborhood in Palermo, never falling into miserabilism.
In the Danisinni district of Palermo, Italy, Mary, Rosy, and Angelo form a lively trio. Barely ten years old, these friends decide one day to explore the abandoned preschool across the street. In The Castle, directors Danny Biancardi, Virginia Nardelli, and Stefano La Rosa place their camera at the children’s level, capturing their adventures while managing to remain unobtrusive, preserving the spontaneity of the young protagonists. The feature-length documentary premiered at CPH:DOX 2025, where it was presented in the DOX:AWARD section.
From the opening scenes, we are swept into this whirlwind of childhood exploration by a camera that adopts the trio’s point of view. As they peer through binoculars to scout the area and check that the coast is clear – quickly disregarding their families’ warnings not to venture into the abandoned building – the directors mirror their gaze, as if we, too, were looking through the binoculars.
After clearing debris from one of the rooms and furnishing it with a few old pieces of furniture, Mary, Rosy, and Angelo transform the deserted school into a genuine refuge – a space where they can escape their everyday reality and dream of a better future. Visually at first, and later through the children’s dialogues, the film gradually reveals the difficult social context of their neighborhood, marked by violence. A physical and verbal violence, which begins at an early age with intimidations – so much so that Angelo is afraid to mix with other boys his age – and intensifies in adulthood through vendettas. But also a domestic violence, that the protagonists are determined not to replicate in the future. “If you take a boy like someone from here […] then when you grow up, you could find yourself in a situation like your mother’s, my mother’s,” responds one of the trio’s friends, invited into their hideout, as they excitedly discuss their plans for the future.
Through the trio’s spontaneous and innocent perspective, the directors highlight the importance of creating safe spaces, “hideouts”, in which children from disadvantaged neighborhoods can escape the difficulties and violence they face daily, giving them room to dream and shape their own identities. The film ends with a project to rehabilitate the abandoned school and transform it into a community center for local children, in an attempt to break the cycle of violence that is, in part, rooted in childhood trauma.
