Two powerful short films charting a Southern Italian bloodletting ritual and one family’s journey through mourning, faith and devotion in the 21st century.

Screening at the Barbican:
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/flesh-wax-glass-pt-1-2-b...
Mon 10 Nov 2025, 18:30

Part I, The Age of the Father, follows Saturno, a Calabrian lorry driver undertaking his 33rd Vattienti procession, where men hit their legs with glass-embedded disks of cork known as a cardo (thistle). Shot on 16mm, the film presents a tender portrait of ritual, interweaving the Holy Week with imagery of the Stromboli volcano and pelicans, a medieval symbol for Christ. Shortly after filming, Saturno died suddenly, shaping the sequel.

Part II, The Age of the Son, revisits the rite through Saturno’s son Francesco, focusing on the hugely emotional moment where he undertakes the ritual without his father for the first time. The film becomes haunted by Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and Coby Sey’s delicate score is underpinned by a cover of the gospel tune ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’.

Screening as part of the Jarman Award 2025 shortlist.

George Finlay Ramsay (b. Dundee, Scotland, bad back, eczema, bipolar spectrum?) is an artist working with the love of volcanoes, poetry, ritual and analogue filmmaking. His first artistic acts occurred at the age of three, and involved inventing a religion with sticks, and setting his room on fire. Subsequent acts include burning hundreds of regrets in volcanoes (2017–2018).

His fake epic poem Raven’s Reprise (2020) tells of a trickster raven travelling through the pandemic and remaking the world to her better designs. His short film CASTOROCENE (2021) sees beavers re-build the world after humans have destroyed it. Mid length film Family Fugue (2022) is about how we are haunted by, and in turn haunt our ancestors. Nursted, from the sleep side (2023) and deals with the idea of a house falling asleep, and Flesh Wax & Glass (ongoing) charts three years of a bloodletting ritual in the south of Italy, and one family’s process of mourning.