The Implosive

Carmine Stanga, now in his seventies, is an old mafia boss who has been hiding himself for years in a shack next to a cottage, in the middle of the Sicilian countryside.

His trusted right-hand man Ninnì Bisaccia collects the “pizzini” (small slips of paper that the Sicilian mafia uses for high-level communications) with which Carmine continues to command his gang. The country house belongs to an accomplice farmer, Lallo Cutrò. 

Suddenly one day, Ninnì’s visits stop, and even Lallo stops going . What could have happened? Why, all of a sudden, does the world outside seem to no longer exist? Carmine tries to understand it by drawing from the collection of received and sent “pizzini”; in the meanwhile he tries to get food and especially water, fights against an inflamed prostate, reads the Bible and discovers strange similarities between his story and the one of Job or Samson, recalls in his memory the bloodiest episodes of his life as a mafioso, thinks about Egle, the woman of his life, with nostalgia and yearning. 

Until, like any self-respecting Robinson Crusoe, Carmine finds some footprints near the country house and captures a boy who doesn’t speak and expresses himself only through elementary drawings. Cagnolazzo – this is the name that Carmine gives to the young man – will become his very personal Friday and will offer him an antidote to a loneliness which was by now unbearable.