“The history of peoples is made up of small events that intertwine with broader scenarios. The choices of
each individual influence the course of events, and in turn, those choices are shaped by forces that govern
wider horizons.

De-Parting A Story of Longing is the intimate exploration of a microhistory that ends up reflecting macrohistory. In this story there are eight siblings, two continents, a few chickens, and one house. 1957 is the year the walls of that house were raised by hand, and the year this tale begins. Two sisters decide to return for a few days to their father’s old home. This triggers the release of memories.

Their family, composed of eight siblings, was deeply affected by emigration. Many threads, many stories woven into one. The entire course of life—baptisms, weddings, funerals—flows through a long thread of memory that becomes historical testimony. The recovery of a family’s past becomes a symbolic recovery of countless lives.

No matter the reason for leaving, de-parture is a departure marked by separation, touching anyone who has
embraced a migratory fate. It is a severance that divides branches, creates absence in those who stay, and
wounds those who leave. In facing the fear of uncertainty and the dread of looking back, one’s sense of
place shifts forever—sometimes with resignation, always with pain—woven into a pattern that echoes in the
lives of millions of migrants.

To emigrate means many things: leaving one’s home, discovering a new country, maintaining strong ties to one’s origins, integrating without losing one’s identity, preserving family habits, constantly seeking connection with the other side of the world, reaffirming oneself through visual imagery, coping with distant mourning, protecting memories, accepting the compromise of a new language and forging a hybrid one— like Siculish, a mix of Sicilian and English.

I lived all of this as a privileged observer. I read letters, loaded film reels, watched reunions and phone calls.
The uniqueness and strength of this journey lies in the archival material—amateur and homemade—that
traces 60 years of history: super8, then VHS, then DVD, and finally video calls. Footage that belongs to my
family, which I now offer to the narrative, carefully and consciously, to be critically entrusted to History.

Using family and amateur material to tell a story is not new. The relationship between intimate footage and
cinematic form is, for every story, something to be explored anew—through the power of juxtaposing one’s
own emotions with History. And it is no coincidence that each of these stories always finds its own deeply
personal narrative imprint.

This documentary is a complex, valuable, and important narrative challenge. It led me into and out of the
memories of the characters, into the lives of those who stayed in Sicily, into their emotions, into the
photographs in search of memories, reviving fragments of history. A departing ship. A phone call that
arrives. It is the incredible challenge of exploring the human soul: perceiving its faint signals in gestures,
interpreting unspoken words through glances, and diving into the psyche of people who are no longer my
relatives, but individuals observed in their purest human condition.

“There where the pacifier falls, the seed is planted,” says a proverb.

This is the price of emigration: family fragmentation and nostalgia, which feed that innate sense of fatalism carried in the heart of every Sicilian.

Alessia Scarso