The Assumption

Randazzo, Sicily, which celebrates the Feast of the Assumption by hoisting children aloft, attached by belts of steel to a pole that's storeys tall, a physical expression of a biblical ascension that is dragged, laden with metaphor, through the streets. In a flow that is perhaps less achronological than without narrative, there are scenes of costumes being fitted while water balloons are flung and bouts of synchronised dancing to euro(techno/disco) are punctured by the passage of priests bearing garment bags and shoes and bags sit unattended on tables and farfalle and pesto are consumed and there is a sense of a moment within a place that makes the film a run-on sentence.

Or something else, perhaps. A set of moments. Components pictured singly. Stations of a cross. Scenes that are familiar individually. Something constructed. Made. Writers/directors Daniele Greco and Manuel Maugero have created a minimal portrait of something ornate, but in that fusion of temporal and spiritual and atemporal and aspiritual, have produced something good.