Details
Movie Description
Italian director Gabriele Salvatores (MEDITERRANEO) masterfully directs this eerie and engrossing suspense thriller involving a 10-year-old boy who lives in rural southern Italy. It is summertime and Michele (Guiseppe Cristiano) is free to spend the long sunny days riding his bike and running through the wheat fields. In fact, the wheat could be considered Michele's costar, as it often consumes the entire scope of the screen, showing how Michele plays, hides, and ponders life in the vast expanses of flowing yellow stalks. Because there are only a few other children in the village, Michele often plays alone, and one day he discovers a hole in the ground, obscured by wheat, where a boy his age is chained and imprisoned. The boy has clearly been starved and mistreated, yet Michele approaches him fearlessly and attempts to make friends with him. With the dreaminess that is a 10-year-old's truest treasure, Michele doesn't ask too many questions, nor does he draw conclusions about why the boy is in the hole, or who put him there. Through the expressions on young Michele's face, viewers can read his light questioning of human existence, human morality, and human rights. However, as the film draws on, subtly revealing shocking secrets about the adults in Michele's village, the beauty of this utterly simple yet deadly powerful plot come clear. I'M NOT SCARED is a moving film built on crystal-clear images of the Italian sun, sky, and wheat fields; strangely offset by its startling loss-of-innocence story.
Film Notes
DVD Features:
Region 1
Keep Case
Full Frame - 1.33
Theatrical Release: APRIL 9, 2004 (NY/LA)
Industry Reviews
"With a taste for dark lyricism, the director delicately emphasizes the contrast between surface innocence."
Entertainment Weekly - Lisa Schwarzbaum (04/16/2004)
"The golden desolation of summer wheat fields in southern Italy is filmed with such visual intensity in the thriller I'M NOT SCARED that its brilliance is almost blinding."
New York Times - Stephen Holden (04/09/2004)
"I'M NOT SCARED, as beautiful as it is disturbing, is an acutely perceptive study of character, as revealed in relations between children and especially between children and adults."
Los Angeles Times - Kevin Thomas (04/09/2004)
"[H]auntingly beautiful....The cinematography is reminiscent of Terence Malick's DAYS OF HEAVEN."
USA Today - Claudia Puig (04/09/2004)
"I'M NOT SCARED is a reminder of true childhood, of its fears and speculations..."
Chicago Sun-Times - Roger Ebert (04/23/2004)
"Not since CHILDREN OF THE CORN have fields of grain done so much for a thriller."
Premiere - Premiere Staff (12/01/2004)
"Leisurely paced thriller with a nostalgic streak."
Uncut - Peter Hogan (01/01/2005)
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