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I'm Not Scared More at IMDbPro »Io non ho paura (original title)

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81 reviews in total

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59 out of 66 people found the following review useful:
Almost a Perfect Film, 21 May 2004

Author: Maga from the Greater Southwest

I don't know what it is about Italian directors, but it just seems that they are more interested in making classic movies than their American counterparts. They don't rely on body counts, car crashes and pyrotechnics. Instead they tell stories and use beautiful images and scenery to enhance it. In "Io non ho paura" we are treated to a coming of age fable that indeed makes one feel young again. We see the world through a ten year old's eyes and sadly, we see how reality starts to over take the innocence of youth. Michele lives in an economically depressed part of Southern Italy. He has a father that is often absent and surroundings that come straight out of Dickens. However, even with very little, he manages to entertain himself and little sister. One day while retrieving something for his little sister, he makes an odd discovery, a child, living in a hole, far away from anywhere. He soon comes to see that this child is being held captive. Of course, being a ten year old, Michele has many wild ideas about why the child is in the hole. However, as the film progresses, Michele starts to grow up and realize what a harsh world it can be. What really makes this movie are the beautiful shots of Southern Italy, where golden fields go as far as the eye can see. And although the film's ending is a slight letdown, overall it is still a wonderful film. Here is hoping that some American directors might find their souls and start trying to emulate this type of cinema. Bravo!

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50 out of 57 people found the following review useful:
Powerfully moving, 2 May 2004

Author: Howard Schumann from Vancouver, B.C.

I have been critical of films that sidestep issues of conscience for broader appeal, so when a film comes along that tackles the issue head on, it is important to take notice. Set in Southern Italy in 1978, I'm Not Scared by Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo) is about a child who discovers a small lad hidden in a cavernous hole near an abandoned farmhouse and acts with courage and compassion to "do the right thing". The film is partly a standard commercial product with a predictable plot, sentimental music, and pseudo-lyrical slow motion shots but it also embodies an artistic sensibility that expressively captures the world of a child in its wonder, innocence, and beauty. Similar to the 1996 film La Promesse by the Dardenne Brothers, it is a film about a young boy's awakening of conscience.

Ten-year old Michele, exquisitely performed by first-time actor Giuseppe Cristiano, is outgoing, intelligent, and strong-willed and there is a great deal of warmth and knowing in his face that makes us instinctively care about him. Michele and his friends play in the vast golden wheat fields during summer and all seems idyllic. When Michele looks for a pair of glasses lost by his sister Maria (Giulia Matturo), however, he makes an unexpected discovery. Beneath a straw-covered plank in the ground he finds Filippo (Mattia Di Pierro), a scared, dirty, and almost blind boy of his own age. The child, chained to a stake and barely alive, is subject to hallucinations and believes that he is dead and that Michele is his guardian angel. We don't know if the boy is a "wild child" or the victim of an unspeakable crime. Instead of reporting his finding to his overburdened mother (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon), or his moody working class father (Dino Abbrescia), he keeps the secret to himself, bringing bread and water to the starving boy and the two develop a mystical bond of friendship.

When Michele finds out the shocking reason that Filippo is in the cave, he discovers the strength within himself to stand up for what he thinks is right even though it leaves him open to potentially damaging consequences. I'm Not Scared does not idealize children and paint all adults as evil. The children can be ruthless in cruelly teasing the weakest members of their group and in selling out to the wrongdoers for trifles, for example, just to sit at the wheel of a car. The adults commit a heinous crime out of the desperation of poverty or for unstated political reasons but their love for their own children is clear. Based on a novel by Niccoló Amminiti, I'm Not Scared is part suspense drama and part coming-of-age story but cannot be neatly categorized. It is has a strange otherworldly and mythical quality to it, like a cinematic dream and the result is not vacuously uplifting but powerfully moving. In discovering the cave where Filippo is hidden, Michele truly discovers a cave "filled with gems and gold".

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41 out of 49 people found the following review useful:
A Big Surprise, 10 February 2003

Author: Benjamin Stello from Rellingen, Germany

I saw this film on the Berlin film festival without having an idea of what may follow, and I was very surprised: this picture is one of the best, at least of this year.

A young boy, growing up in a little village somewhere in Italy, discovers an other young boy hiding in a small hole. Nobody in the whole village seems to know anything about him- but then the enigma around the discovery is revealed when the first boy listens hidden to a conversation about the second boy - and this conversation is held by his parents...

First of all: A great acted movie. The young actors are splendid. A good script too: very moody, and exciting too. Then I have to mention the very nice landscape in which the film is set, and the cinematography capturing it. And so on... a nearly perfect film, and you will do a good choice when seeing it! I do not like superlatives very much, but: 10 out of 10.

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30 out of 33 people found the following review useful:
Boys Will Be Men, and Men Will Be Boys, 6 May 2004
Author: noralee from Queens, NY

"I'm Not Scared (Io non ho paura)" has a lot in common with the recent Russian film "The Return (Vozvrashcheniye)."

Both start off with poor pre-teen boys' bullying games that then intersect with their returning fathers' parallel adult realities. The contrasting conclusions reflect different national temperaments and the possible political messages in the films.

A major difference is the look that surrounds the contrasts between childhood innocence and male brutishness (abetted by cowed female complicity), where the Russian film is practically in a frigid black and white, the Italian film has the lush, sentimental cinematography of Italo Petriccione, who also worked with director Gabriele Salvatores on the dreamily beautiful "Mediterraneo."

The suspenseful thriller aspects roped me in, though the tension was undercut a bit by the Lavender Hill Mob antics of the conspirators, but the bumbling added to an uneasy feeling of unpredictability, aided by the suspenseful music by Ezio Bosso and Pepo Scherman.

We literally see the happenings through the eyes of the children, which is helped enormously by the unusually expressive and naturalistic child actors Giuseppe Cristiano and Mattia Di Pierro.

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25 out of 28 people found the following review useful:
A director we should see more of, 9 May 2004
Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Children may keep secrets to compete with the world of adults which for them is a secret, even when adults aren't trying to hide from the children what they do. In I'm Not Scared (Io non ho paura) the adults are hiding what they do, and doing very bad things. A boy uncovers their dark secret, but it's a mystery to him, so he interprets it for himself through what it tells him, and through the fables, fairytales, and comic books his head is full of. He lives in the country, in the south of Italy, where there are a couple of cars and a TV and the local convenience store comes on wheels once in a while. His house is separated from the mystery by hills and fields of high grass, and across and over a hill out of sight lies the sea. The world of 10-year-old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) is filled with light. His arms and legs are strong and brown from riding his bike everywhere in the summer sun. The secret he discovers is dark and blind and pale, a creature that at first terrifies him and then evokes his pity.

I'm Not Afraid is a movie that works only if you consent to see the world through the eyes of Michele but also accept that Gabriele Salvatores, the director, who's adapting a novel, isn't telling us all that's going on in Michele's mind either. This is a world of the purely physical that conceals and evokes a spiritual and moral (and immoral) world. Michele doesn't understand at first what his father is involved in, but lives in his own world of secrets, bargains, and revelations that only slowly comes to terms with what the adults are doing and tries to trump them. (A child has the advantage of being regarded as unimportant and therefore is unseen.) This aspect of the movie is reminiscent of René Clément's Forbidden Games (Jeux interdits, 1952), a story of children creating their own strange rituals hidden away from adults in a world of war filled with inexplicable mystery and terror. Paura doesn't quite have the resonance of Clément's film, perhaps primarily because it hasn't got the emotional force of a world war behind it; but it does have the mystery and the horror.

The real horror here is the greed of petty gangsters. Michele's truck driver father (who's rarely around) and a couple of shady pals have kidnapped a boy for ransom. The facts appear on the TV news that everybody watches at Michele's house and Michele pieces together a story from seeing a mother plead for mercy for her timid son and time to get together the money, and from hearing the adults' quarrels at night in his house. When police helicopters come and the adults draw straws he realizes their scheme has failed and they are going to kill the boy and hide his body to escape punishment and he must try to help the boy escape.

But the horror is also the little body in the dark hole: at first the boy – shaggy-haired, covered with mud, draped in a dark cloth, terrified himself and crazed from the isolation and imprisonment -- seems like a strange monster that terrifies Michele and us. With great economy of means, I'm Not Afraid is three stories in one: a horror story, a crime story, and a story of a boy's glimmerings of adulthood. Michele isn't adult enough to think of calling the police (even if he could in this rural place); the boy down in the hole, who he learns from the `Telegiornale' TV news is called Filippo, is his secret and his special pet, whom he tries to feed and takes out for a walk in the high grass (Filippo is blinded by the light and staggers like a mole) and then puts back in the hole.

The risk Salvatores takes is to absorb the atmosphere of Michele's country, summer world. Only the sometimes obtrusive arty string quartet music distracts us from the slow rhythms of summer days, games with friends, the bespectacled little sister, bike rides over the gentle hills and romps in the tall grass – which, symbolically, is mowed down at the end when the play is over and Michele has been disabused of his fantasies. But not quite: he chants phrases from books to steel himself when he goes by night the last time to rescue Filippo from his new imprisonment near a pigsty. (With gruesome rustic practicality the failed gangsters plan to feed Filippo's corpse to the pigs.)

Salvatores, the director, doesn't quite leave the child's world behind himself, either: his ending is a kind of mythical wish fulfillment, an image of the kidnapped boy being saved, Michele surviving a gunshot wound, Filippo reaching out his hand to his `Guardian Angel' (as he has called him) in a flood of light. On one level the movie is a scandalous story from the Italian police blotter. But on another it's a fable of mysterious import. Perhaps Filippo, whose the same age and at the same level in school, is Michele's dark secret underside, his imagination and his child's freedom, which the adults put in chains and try to destroy. The final music is a little too pretty and arty and the ending is a little too good to be true (more so than the book's), but Salvatores' film is a memorable evocation of childhood, brilliantly acted by the children, especially the gifted Cristiano -- with links to other striking tales of a child's discovery of adult evil like Carol Reed's 1948 The Fallen Idol. It's an astonishingly peaceful and beautiful film that manages to remain selfconsicously simple, almost opaque, without descending into cliché or self indulgence at any point. Salvatores is an Italian director of distinction (his 1992 Mediterraneo won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film) whose work we deserve to see more of.

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21 out of 22 people found the following review useful:
A child's rite of passage to adulthood treated as an unconventional thriller., 5 July 2004
Author: BradBate from Honolulu, Hawaii

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

The loss of innocence can be a frightening experience, especially for ten-year-old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano), who discovers that another boy is being held captive in a deep hole next to an abandon farmhouse. Not only is it frightening to see a child your own age shackled, hungry and thirsty, living in filth, but when Michele realizes his own father may be a kidnapper, he hardly knows what to do.

That is the basis for Director Gabriele Salvatores' wonderful film from the best selling Italian novel, `Io non ho paura.' The film, shot almost entirely from the perspective of a youngster, was Italy's entry in this year's Academy Awards. Writer Niccolo Ammaniti first created the story, set among the rolling wheat fields of Calabria (the toe of the boot in extreme southwest Italy), as a screenplay. But he found a publisher who was interested in it as a book before he found a producer, so the novel was born. Later, he authored the screenplay from which Salvatores worked.

First, this is a story of secrets; in this case, the secrets kids keep from their parents, that parents keep from their children, that youngsters keep from each other. Michele's father Pino (a pitch-perfect performance from Dino Abbrescia), a cocky, domineering bantam of a character, is routinely away from his tiny rural village for mysterious and extended periods of time. But he always returns with small presents for the boy and his little sister. On this homecoming, he is full of secrets, which he shares with his wife Anna (a frightened, high-strung and convincing Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), and rough-hewn new friends who are always gathering conspiratorially around the family television. When Michele first finds the imprisoned Filippo (Mattia DiPierro), he keeps the discovery a secret, bringing the boy food and water, seemingly waiting for the right time to tell his parents. But soon, it becomes apparent that his parents are somehow involved. He tells a friend, who immediately betrays him, and soon the young prisoner and his potential savior find themselves in serious peril.

Salvatores, whose `Mediterraneo' won a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1992, cast `I'm Not Scared' from a pool of local children who had never acted before. In the main, he achieved a remarkable sense of realism from their performances, first by choosing kids with personalities and life experiences compatible with their characters, then shooting the film in sequence, only revealing the story to his performers a day at a time. The film is set in 1978, a time of an alarming number of kidnappings of children from wealthy, northern Italian families, by ransom-hungry people in the south. But it is much more a film of betrayal than it is of kidnapping, betrayal leading to the utter loss of innocence.

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21 out of 24 people found the following review useful:
What lies beneath, 16 April 2004

Author: jotix100 from New York

Having seen the trailer for the film, I was intrigued. If one doesn't catch an Italian film cycle, it's almost impossible to see a film from that country lately, even in a cosmopolitan city like New York. This film has just been released for a commercial run. Having seen "Mediterraneo" from the same director, Gabriele Salvatores, was another reason for taking a look at this movie.

The film depicts the horrors that Italy lived in the 70s with a wave of kidnappings. While a lot had political undertones, the fact remains that a lot of children were kidnapped for a ransom.

The idyllic way the film unfolds, with the children running freely in the wheat fields, is a sharp contrast of the mystery that is hidden, in a hole, by the abandoned house where they go to play. Michele, the boy at the center of the story, discovers the dark secret that will involve his own family and will end in a tragedy.

This is a story about friendship, loyalty and the realization of the ugliness behind what appears a serene, if poor, family life. Giuseppe Cristiano plays the young boy with conviction and makes us believe he is that boy presented in the story. It also speaks volumes how children interplay with others of their same age no matter whether they are rich, or poor.

The director is to be congratulated for dealing with the subject matter and making us care about a little boy that had the courage to save a life. We'll be looking forward other films from Mr. Salvatores, very soon.

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14 out of 14 people found the following review useful:
A summer surprising and suspenseful, 28 April 2007

Author: chicitysue from Chicago, Illinois

I personally really like movies that portray childhood the way I remember it--kids doing kid-like activities and adventures, summers with free time to wander and explore, and seeing the way kids think. They don't quite see things as adults do. The kids in the movie were quite realistic.

I think that Michele, the main character has more awareness and sympathy for people than most kids as evidenced by the stories he writes and reads to his sister. After he finds a child in a hole in the ground he writes a story about a child hidden away. Yet he reacts like a child in that he doesn't realize that there is something illegal going on, at least at first. The story unfolds slowly but steadily.

Because this movie is about kids and some suspicious people (Michele's father and friends)and the story is not written with a formula, there is an added dimension to the element of unpredictability.

I truly was inspired by the cinematography showing the idyllic scenes of the summer and wheat fields of Italy, including the insects and wildlife. I really liked the scene with the three threshers approaching Michele as he was crossing the fields. This scene also made us aware of the passing of time and probably summer soon ending. Also, there is, as there in many neighborhoods, a grumpy scary person (the hog farmer) who adds to the atmosphere of unpredictability.

The music is absolutely wonderful. And it is not just the music, but also listen to the skill of the musicians. Just because it is a string quartet playing, don't think it's boring.

In summary, this is a suspenseful, beautiful movie.

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16 out of 19 people found the following review useful:
Original and Sensitive Story of Innocence and Compassion – An Unforgettable Gem, 3 January 2006

Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

In the field in the country of Italy, the ten years old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) accidentally finds a weird boy in a hole in an abandoned farmhouse. He gives water and feeds the boy; he finds his name, Fillipo (Mattia Di Pierro), they are of the same age and Michele becomes his friend. In his innocence, Michele finds the nasty secret hidden by his family about Fillipo.

"Io non ho Paura" was a great surprise for me. I have just watched this movie and I did not have any information about this original and sensitive low paced story of innocence and compassion. The screenplay is perfect, developing the characters and disclosing the secrets through the innocent eyes of a ten years old boy, having a sensational plot point, in a wonderful landscape and a very sentimental soundtrack. The direction and the cinematography are remarkable, and when Michele rides his bicycle at night, we can see the night creatures in the fields. The performances of Giuseppe Cristiano, in a beautiful and morally strong character, and Mattia Di Pierro, in the role of a defenseless victim, are awesome. This awarded "Io non ho Paura" is an unforgettable gem to be discovered by lovers of a great cinema. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Eu Não Tenho Medo" ("I Have No Fear")

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12 out of 14 people found the following review useful:
Who can you trust when everyone's a suspect?, 13 January 2006

Author: Lady Targaryen from Brazil

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

''Io non ho paura'' is a very good and surprising Italian movie. Michele(Giuseppe Cristiano) is 10 year old boy who lives near a wheat field with his family. He and his younger sister Maria are used to play with their friends in these fields, until one day Michele discovers a boy with his age who is hidden in a underground cave. First he stays frighted, but after that he worries about the boy and starts to feed and give water to him regularly. One night, Michele wakes up and listen to his father and his father's friends talking about a kidnapped boy called Filippo, and when he sees Filippo's picture in TV he immediately discovers that he is the boy he found out in the cave.

This movie is very good and is based in a real life event, what makes it even better and surprising to watch.

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