Filmed entirely with a mobile phone, La paura shows a series of Italian images captured "wildly" by Pippo Delbono. The various sequences of the feature film, characterized by the typical graininess of these miniature cameras, give life to a biting poetry. Thus a dialogue is established between the artist's prominent belly and that absurd Italian television program that talks about childhood obesity and in which a doctor, also obese, invites children to do physical activity. But this diary of images does not only contain funny episodes; it is also a testimony to the general state of the Italian peninsula (Rome in particular) and its political culture, always ready to stigmatize Roma and foreigners. In fact, Pippo Delbono takes to the field, going to Milan to attend the funeral of the young African killed on 14 September 2008 by the owners of a shop, father and son, for stealing a packet of biscuits. The artist records so as not to forget. It mercilessly records this tragic moment, the consequence of a moment of ordinary racism. A policeman approaches him at the end of the ceremony and asks him not to throw oil on the fire. Other moments of shame: reading xenophobic and offensive phrases written on a wall or the incredible number of people living on the streets. Oscillating between the serious and the facetious, Pippo Delbono also exposes the society of the spectacle with his cell phone. Like the faces framed in the foreground, the world is represented without embellishment or artifice. Because the raw material of the film is the truth, the tangible and demonstrable reality, captured and edited by the artist, who manages to transform that object that each of us keeps in our pocket into an instrument of liberation.
Pippo Delbono, author, actor, director, was born in Varazze in 1959. In the 1980s he began studying dramatic art in a traditional school which he left following his meeting with Pepe Robledo, an Argentine actor from Libre Teatro Libre (a theater group active in South America in the 1970s that used collective creation as a means of expression and denunciation of the dictatorship in Argentina). Together they moved to Denmark and joined the Farfa group, directed by Iben Nagel Rasmussen, historical actress of the Odin Teatret and for Delbono an alternative path began in search of a new theatrical language. Delbono dedicates himself to the study of the principles of oriental theater which he deepens in subsequent stays in India, China and Bali, where the central focus is the actor's meticulous and rigorous work on the body and voice. In 1987 he created his first show, The Time of Assassins and in the same year he met Pina Bausch who invited him to participate in one of the works of her Wuppertaler Tanztheater. This extraordinary occasion marks a fundamental stage in the director's artistic career. Delbono's shows are not productions of theatrical texts but total creations, the actors are part of a nucleus that maintains and grows over time. Already in the first work the features of a unique theatrical lexicon are defined which represents the peculiarity of all subsequent creations.