The Secret Drawer

When a documentary filmmaker turns their camera on themself or their own family, the results can quickly become ponderously self-indulgent. This isn’t the case with Costanza Quatriglio’s The Secret Drawer. The movie is a gentle and uncluttered exploration of her father’s work, its insights into 20^th-century European life and the bond between father and daughter. The director’s father is the late Giuseppe Quatriglio, the prolific Sicilian writer and journalist, whose work (regrettably) isn’t perhaps so well-known in the English-speaking world.

After Giuseppe Quatriglio passed away in 2017, his daughter began the almighty task of sorting through her father’s archives and private library. In doing so, she unavoidably began to think about her father’s life, work and general exploits. It’s dismissive to call Il cassetto segreto a biopic, or even the story of Quatriglio senior, since such a simplistic description hides the richness and complexity of Quatriglio junior’s film. It’s not expressly a love letter to her father and the time he lived in, but a form of cinematic subjectivity (it’s about her dad, after all) that really works, creating a multilayered snapshot of a body of work, and what the man who created that work represented to his daughter.

There are a few missteps, none of which deter that much from the overall effectiveness of the piece. Quatriglio’s choice to score key sequences with contemporary music creates an unfortunate clash between the onscreen imagery and the soundtrack. The format of the film, in which the director plays with an audience’s expected chronology (the feature begins with an epilogue and begins with a prologue, for example) is a curious idea, but doesn’t enhance much.

It’s the sort of movie that’s deeply interesting, although not entirely revelatory. It could be assumed that many of the points touched upon would feel more impactful if a viewer was Italian, or even a member of the Quatriglio family. Having said that, the film is self-disciplined when it could have very easily been a vanity project, and the director has done a masterful job of ensuring that her work should be of interest to those who perhaps have never heard of her father – and ideally, The Secret Drawer will do something to rectify that.

Oliver Johnston

The Secret Drawer does not have a UK release date yet.

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