Sydney Sibilia’s greatest talent is writing characters you love from the very first scenes. If one looks at her filmography, the protagonists that she chooses to stage are often people who know no fixity, can’t stand abuse of power, are anarchists, in the most ideological and least socially overturning sense.
Edward Leo in I stop when I want trudges into an underpaid job, trying to free himself in a reality that does not allow him to fulfill himself in any way and, in all three acts, expresses the will to self-determination by forming a group, to be strong together, never striving for one. And yet we can observe this feeling even in theIncredible history of the Isola delle Rosein which the director stages the birth of a micronation, a self-determined and free state.
And this tension is also perceptible in Sydney Sibilia’s most recent project, Mixed by Erry, which tells the story of Enrico Frattasio, Erry DJ of Forcella, who between the 80s and 90s created an empire thanks to his talent in mixing counterfeit cassettes later sold throughout Italy. his activity, Mixed By Errywithout his knowledge becomes one of the first record labels in Italy.
Mixed by Erry: the review of Sydney Sibilia’s film
Napoli. 80s. The Frattasio brothersLouis D’Oriano, Giuseppe Arena e Emmanuel Palumbo) grow in the alleys of Forcella. The father (played by Adriano Pantaleo) to make a living he sells tea passing it off as whiskey which he then sells to tourists in Piazza Garibaldi. Enrico dreams of being a DJ, meanwhile he works in an appliance store and for his friends he creates compilations on cassette tapes to make ends meet. A passion that becomes a success, first in Naples and then everywhere. The three brothers build an empire based on mixtapes, an empire that will then lead the law to fill its regulatory vacuum and to take serious measures against piracy, a crime then still unknown.
Needless to say Mixed by Erryin cinemas from March 2, 2023 and coming soon Netflixis a project supported by a soundtrack that goes in every direction, there really is everything: Jackson 5, Eurythmics, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Run-DMC, Peppino of Capri, Fiorella Mannoia (really Set free). And the New Romantic, much mentioned in the film. There is the best of the 80s, a compilation worthy of the Guardians of the Galaxywhich is not by chance the film that concerns him the most (some scenes are specular, such as the moment in which Erry takes the headphones and lets the girl from the never received compilation wear them).
Mixed by Erry it’s a work that plays with genres, sometimes it’s a gangster movie, then it’s noir, a dramedy, and then it almost becomes a musical to all intents and purposes, it’s true, you don’t dance, but in reality you dance a lot. Sydney Sibilia photographs marvelous spaces, and it is difficult not to be sentimentally linked to those places, from Piazza Garibaldi, to Forcella, to the endless alleys, and above all she photographs a crystallized time, the one that surrounded a reality, that of Naples which emerged from smuggling, the sunset of the cassettesthe arrival of the first CDs, analogue, digital.
And yet above all he photographs a way of being in the world, a way of filling silences and of choosing to entrust music, or rather compilations, with the arduous task of pronouncing things that are impossible to say. The act of giving away a mixtape has been lost. Today music is perhaps worse, because it wants to be experienced, frequented. It’s just that it’s hard to attend an absence.
The best of the 80s, a compilation worthy of Guardians of the Galaxy
There are at least three things to be said about Sydney Sibilia’s writing. The first is that her films are stories of rebellion. The characters start from a condition of hardship, marginality, unhappy social and economic conditions. Succeeding in overcoming difficulties, often with great results, they exercise a certain omnipotence. Element that brings us to the second thing to say about Sibilia’s writing. No one is omnipotent but everyone can believe they are. Even just for a moment. Characters often appear who recreate family contexts, social states, united groups, in which there is brotherhood, there is familiarity with trust, with the closeness of the other: there is love but it is a political act that measures distance and the presence.
And then there’s a third thing to say: Sibilia’s gaze, while seeking the chronology of things, actually proceeds by analogy. There are things and people that are evoked, brought back to life, suggested, but the fabric that binds them is not temporal but spatial: Sydney Sibilia chooses to tell a small time in a boundless space, in which reality proceeds by suspension and interrupts its chronology to reawaken in ritualslike the familiar ones in which smuggled whiskey is produced, and it is precisely there that one of the most beautiful lines of the film is evoked: “Dad, but we earn billions and we still have to go to the market?”.
Or like those of the creation of music, which is obsessively framed, the act of creation, the choice of the mixer, of a suitable duplicator, the cassettes, the storage, the hard search for funds, legitimate and illegitimate, a constant, perpetual ritual which becomes tone and rhythm, method and practice, it is ritual and myth that meet, because the rite presupposes a community around which it should take shapeand the awareness that around us there is someone to share it with.
Which is the most inclined reading of a DJ’s work. Enrico Frattasio, Erry DJ, just wanted to be a DJ. Which is a ritual work, and the ritual presupposes knowledge, attention, community, it presupposes the love of music, and that nobody stops it. DJs can also be born in Forcella.