Andrea Deaglio receives Mercurius Prize
On 18 October 2024 the screening of the film Un milione di granelli di sabbia, by Andrea Deaglio, was held at the Cinema Beltrade in Milan. In attendance were director Andrea Deaglio, the film’s producer Matteo Tortone, Eva Pattis Zoja (psychoanalyst – CIPA-IAAP) who stars in the film, Enrico Ferrari, president of the Jungian Association CIPA (IAAP), and Chiara Tozzi (psychoanalyst – AIPA-IAAP) artistic director of the Mercurius Prize.
The film was received with excitement and enthusiasm by the audience that crowded the hall.
After the screening, the Mercurius Prize award ceremony was held.
Chiara Tozzi presented on behalf of the Mercurius Prize Committee the award to Andrea Deaglio, and a special mention to Eva Pattis Zoja.
This was the motivation for the Mercurius Prize to A Million Grains of Sand:
The Mercurius Prize Committee is pleased to award the MERCURIUS PRIZE to Andrea Deaglio, Director of the film, A Million Grains of Sand, and to Eva Pattis Zoja for her starring role in the film. The members of the Committee commend the quality of the film both for its message and its cinematic technique.
The Mercurius Prize is awarded for films whose sensitivity to psychological truth and depth is shown in the work and that also express caring attention to fundamental human values and human rights. Both dimensions are superbly exemplified in A Million Grains of Sand.
It is in recognition of their outstanding achievement in creating this film that we are pleased to award Andrea Deaglio and Eva Pattis Zoja.
Comments on the film
Eva Pattis is a psychoanalyst who had the courage to step out of her private practice to confront
the tragic situations that History inflicts even on those who, like children and adolescents, suffer them without having the means to process them. Locked in their silence, children and adolescents are often not able to talk about the tragic situations they have suffered or witnessed. And even the words that psychologists, called to their rescue, address to them, return mute and drowned in their silence.
That is why Eva Pattis practiced with them that nonverbal method of “million grains of sand” where tiny miniatures (small thumbnails) of men, women, animals, objects are arranged on the sand to allow them to “remember” in the sense of ‘re-tuning’ with what has been experienced, without having found the words to say it. In this way the trauma resurfaces and, through the scene reconstructed on the sand-tray (that on the sand reconstructs), the child recovers and makes (communicative) the trauma that had become inaccessible to words communicable. This practice, which Eva Pattis inaugurated as the Expressive Sandwork method, has been successfully tested with children and adolescents of the Yazidi genocide in Iraq, earthquake victims in China and veterans of the conflict in Ukraine, enabling so many children and adolescents to communicate what they had locked inside in their enigmatic and dark silence, which words were unable to open (to of opening). (U. Galimberti)
