Bobò

With Bobò, Pippo Delbono creates a work that is above all an awakening: an awakening of dignity, of voice (even if mute), and of human presence. The documentary does not aim for consolatory pity, but for a radical meditation on otherness: a man, deprived of common means of language, becomes the spokesperson for an inner universe that challenges the conventional categories of theatre and life.

The relationship between Delbono and Bobò is the beating heart of the film: he is not just a mentor who “saves” an actor, but a fellow traveler. Delbono says he learned a new language, made of gestures, glances, silences. Every day was a challenge, a personal revolution, even for the director: “every day I had to change something; he always imposed a transformation on me.” This transformation is at the centre of the film and becomes a metaphor for an aesthetic and existential experience: diversity as a source of creativity, not as a deficit to be filled.

The structure of the documentary, which alternates archival footage with new moments shot between Naples, Aversa and other places, gives the story a fluid sense of time. It is not a linear biography, but a portrait that emerges in fragments, like a mosaic: theatre performances, private moments, journeys shared. This narrative choice recalls the idea that identity is not a monolith, but a dance between memory and the present.

On the visual and sound level, Enzo Avitabile’s music adds a further poetic tension: the rhythm, even within the limits of the missing word, becomes the vehicle of a primordial, almost archaic communication. The editing is measured, never excessive: it leaves room for breathing, for silence, for intuition. Delbono’s voice-over is discreet, not encomiastic: it does not glorify Bobò, but bears witness to his greatness with modesty.

There are questions that run through the film like a secret counterpoint, questions that Delbono addresses first to himself rather than to the viewer: what are we afraid of? Of life pressing in, of love that remains or vanishes, of the void that opens when a presence like Bobò’s is no longer there. Fear of walking without him, of no longer knowing how to inhabit lightness, of finding oneself alone amid the noise of the world. “I want people, I need people,” Delbono seems to say, as if theatre were still the only place where solitude cracks, even for just an instant.

Bobò had no sense of time: every now and then they would organize a birthday for him, almost eighty-two years old, as if age were a title of dignity or a handhold amid the confusion. Delbono recalls one anecdote in particular, in Germany: they asked him for explanations, they wanted to “understand,” to slot the mystery of that theatre into a category. But he replied that not everything is meant to be understood. And it was then that Bobò took the microphone and improvised a speech, a flow of sounds and intentions that no one could translate, but that everyone understood. They applauded because in that gesture there was theatre in its essence: an appearing that does not explain, an act sufficient unto itself, a mystery that offers itself.

The film also carries the weight of absence. Bobò has died, and for five years Delbono has no longer heard his voice. In the documentary, a lament overlays the images, music accompanying the view of the cemetery while the dates appear on screen: 1936–2013. Vincenzo Cannavacciuolo, known as Bobò. A name returned to the earth, then brought—symbolically—back to the asylum in Aversa, where nothing remains: empty rooms, corridors that hold an imperceptible echo, the ghost of a place that marked an entire existence. The film records this void, not to fill it, but to recognize its force.

Delbono says that he (Bobò) danced in order to live, to escape the prison that each of us carries inside. Now it is he who dances “like Bobò,” bringing back to the surface, in his own gestures, a continuity that is not imitation but fidelity. A Brazilian poem—quoted at a certain point—seems to sum up their encounter: each person loves as they can, each carries within themselves what they are, and the miracle perhaps lies in still being capable of happiness, in spite of everything.

All that can be known, in the end, is that one must go on: walk as pilgrims of the world, pass through the shadows, wait for an awakening that may never fully come. The archival images alternate with shots in the spaces of the asylum, while a voice sings “salvami” (Ligabue/Avitabile). It is not a religious invocation, but a human gesture: the request not to be forgotten, to remain in the flow of the world even when the stage grows dark.

The film has a strong ethical and political charge: to tell Bobò’s story means to question the institutions that exclude, marginality, and what “humanity” can mean if it cannot be translated into the usual forms of discourse. In this sense, Bobò becomes an act of resistance: not only against stigmatization, but against every form of reducing the human being to what is visible, conventional, easily understandable.

The work has a lyrical power that is rarely encountered in social documentaries: there is a tension toward the absolute, a search for beauty that is not escape but acceptance of limitation. Bobò is not portrayed as a “tragic hero” nor as a “case study”: he is shown in his wholeness, with a presence that is both enigmatic and intense. He is a master of a theatre that rises out of silence, a theatre that does not explain but reveals.