In ‘Dopo Il Maestro’, an assortment of local self-organised groups near the Sicilian ‘model town’ of Gibellina Nuova adopt roles as the anthropomorphised anatomical components of an human body in the aftermath of a power vacuum. A series of consequential discussions and meetings play out in which human and non-human scales, biological and political agency are repeatedly conflated.
The participants are drawn from various organisations including a feminist reading group, a local agricultural union, environmental activists and street skaters and are playing a ‘megagame’ - a kind of highly reactive, large-scale tactical simulation designed to model complex and unstable political events. With the help of designer
John Mizon, I adapted my RPG
After the Maestro into a megagame, in which no single player has a complete overview of the events taking place, and all of their decisions have gravity and consequences.
In the context of Gibellina Nuova, a rapidly emptying town rebuilt by radical architects after an earthquake in 1968, the body-politic thematics become a framework for discussing political inclusion, desertification and rural decline, while the town’s monumental post-modern architecture echoes the fantastical depictions of the inner body seen in
Once Upon A Time...Life, Osmosis Jones and
Cells at Work!.
Absent of any non-diegetic exposition, the viewer is placed in the same partial perspective as the megagame' participants, navigating uncertain scales, unfolding events and shifting relationships to the film’s plural protagonists from scene to scene. The only characters which appear to have any clear perspective of the situation are a collection of local gargoyles, their monstrous architectural nature allowing them to exist both outside of the body-city metaphor and the conditions of the megagame simulation.
In Act II, the anatomy attempts to restructure itself and struggles to reconcile biological metaphor with political goals. In Act III, players collectively contend with the impending death of their body.