The Sled, a perfectly conceived short movie which echoes Orson Welles’ timeless ‘Rosebudian’ whisper of the importance of safeguarding childhood and facing diversity

As the snow globe slips from his hand, Charles Foster Kane, in Orson Welles’s immortal masterpiece Citizen Kane whispers a final word – “Rosebud” – before exhaling his last breath. The sled which had been taken away from him, together with the purity, innocence and joy of his youth, becomes fatally re-evoked, embodying the melancholy of a private existence of that original loving relationship that should envelop the beginning and development of every human being’s life. Emanuela Ponzano, actress and director, once again adopts the iconography of one of cinema’s indisputable classics to stage a mise-en-scene in which she addresses questions that range from the safeguarding of childhood to the possibility of the coexistence of diversities. In Riflessi, her first short film, Ponzano, taking inspiration from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, engaged herself in a successful attempt at autoanalysis which ended with the rebirth of the protagonist. In La slitta (The Sled) she returns to her origins, that no man’s land where a little boy voraciously absorbs all external stimuli, till they are fused into the building of his character and future personality. In this second short film, backed by the strength of a project that aroused interest and financial support from various institutions the director was able to avail herself of a technical troupe and artistic cast of high caliber. The result is a short film that is striking for the solarity of its message that goes straight to the heart of the viewer, thanks to deductive writing that relies on the strength of the images, the splendid scenery of the snowy mountain in Lucania, to offer the emotional stimuli that an overly verbose screenplay would have risked concealing.

The story is very simple: there is a father (Ivan Franek), a mother (Emanuela Ponzano), and a son (in his first role Riccardo Specchio), hence a family, in which a seed of intolerance insinuates itself, perhaps because of the isolation in which the family lives, and only thanks to little Alfred is this danger avoided.  Reality and dream magically blend into one another. Unlike in Welles’s film, of which this film almost seems the “moral compensation”, the sled is present. It is there, ready to accompany the growth of a young life and weld together those differences that if given value constitute the enrichment that cannot be renounced. The two boys (the other young actor is Alban Pajolli who plays a young Albanian boy), at first tenaciously hostile, find themselves in the joy of playing and nothing can contain the overflow of a meeting that breaks down all those barriers that prejudice and the fear of the “other” often build, and, so, all that is left is for them to slide together down the sides of the mountain that offers the ideal backdrop to seal the union of two souls.

It is a joyful occasion to see Alfred and his young friend laugh in an embrace as they run off together. It is a worthy epilogue that finally takes place.

Also of note, the beauty of the Lucan landscape that represents the other irrefutable protagonist of this story, which is the austere, but at the same time fascinating coldness, that makes for a perfect backdrop to the story being told. “La Slitta” for the goodness of the civic values it conveys makes it eminently  suitable for school showings, in the intent of teaching young viewers to respect diversity and to raise awareness in reference to the rights of children that all deserve fair treatment.

A successful experiment indeed.