De-Parting – a Story of Longing

Synopsis

Two sisters return for a few days to Minciucci, Sicily, their father’s old house. Of their Italian family of eight siblings, four emigrated to Australia in the 1950s, a land full of promise.

In the simplicity of daily, age-old gestures, the sisters retrace the thread of memories of their family life, especially of those wh left: the adventure, the longing, the nostalgia, the pain.

Through family footage—baptisms, weddings, funerals— De-Parting. A Story of Longing is an epic family portrait with anthropological undertones, spanning sixty years of a moving connection between two distant worlds and tracing the emotional legacy of 60 million Italians scattered across the globe.

The authors

The children of Teresa, the youngest of the Scarso brothers featured in the documentary. She is a director, he is an editor. Two siblings who, for the first time, bring together their skills and sensitivities to explore and translate into
cinematic form the emotions suspended in time and woven into the fabric of family memory. An intimate and shared perspective, a collaboration that becomes an act of affection: siblings telling the story of siblings, continuing the thread that binds their family’s history.

The characters

Teresa and Gina, the youngest sisters of the Scarso family, serve as the narrating voices of the story, the ones who reconstruct and pass on the family’s memories. Their reflections, along with the old letters their mother wrote to her children abroad, act as narrative junctions. Over the course of a single lunar cycle, the story of the brothers is pieced together.

The relationship between the siblings in Italy and those in Australia forms the backbone of the family narrative across six decades. The connection between the two sides remains open and alive, bridging distant parts of the world in a continuous dialogue. This exchange mirrors the evolution of communication and filmmaking technologies, spanning from the late 1950s to the present day.

A dialogue made of spoken and written words — though often, it is the images that speak louder.

Trailer

Poster

Director’s Statements

“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. Wherever a family is built, roots are set.

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

Stills

Press

Credits

Screenings