LIBERAMI / LIBERA NOS

Each year, in Italy and worldwide, a growing number of people claim to feel possessed by Satan. The Catholic Church answers to this spiritual emergency nominating an increasing number of exorcist priests and organizing training courses. Father Cataldo is one of the most sought-after exorcists in Sicily and elsewhere. He is famous for his tireless fighting spirit.

Every Tuesday Gloria, Enrico, Anna, and Giulia, along with many others, attend Father Cataldo’s mass for deliverance, trying to find a cure for their disease that has neither answer nor a name. To what extent is each of us, believer or not, ready to push himself to show other people his illness? What are we prepared to do to be delivered from it, here and now?

Libera nos is the story about the practice of exorcism and people’s issues of everyday life: the contrasts between ancient traditions and modern habits, between sacred and profane, meet in this astonishing documentary and reveal themselves disturbing and hilarious at the same time. The film is not about religion, but about how religion can be experienced.

Federica Di Giacomo, from La Spezia, is a director and screenwriter. She graduated in anthropology from the University of Florence, a city where she worked for several years in theater. She attended the European Master’s documentary program at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Since 2000 she has been creating documentaries for Raisat Cinema and other broadcasters. 

Her notable work includes three full-length documentaries: Il lato grottesco della vita (The Grotesque Side of Life) (2006), Housing (2009) and Liberami (Libera Nos) (2016), all of which she wrote and directed. Il lato grottesco della vita was awarded a prize at the Turin Film Festival, among other awards. Liberami won the Horizons competition at the 2016 Venice International Film Festival.

She has been teaching documentary classes in Milan and for the Creative documentary master at La Sapienza University of Rome.