I'm Not Scared - Plot

Plot

The film takes place in 1978 in a fictional town called Acqua Traverse in Southern Italy during the hottest summer of the century. A ten-year-old boy named Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) and a group of his friends set out across scorched wheat fields in a race. Michele's sister tags along but falls, breaking her glasses, and calls out to Michele, who runs back to her. Michele quickly appeases her worries over the glasses, and they continue running. Of the group, they are the last ones to arrive at the deserted farmhouse, and Michele, therefore, must pay up. However, the leader of the group, Skull, chooses the only girl in the group besides Michele's sister to pay up instead. He instructs her to expose herself to the boys, and she looks to the others for help, but they refuse to meet her gaze. She reluctantly and hesitantly begins to oblige, when Michele pipes up that he was the one to arrive last and that he should be the one to pay. That is our first major building block of the qualities of the main protagonist on which the film's story will depend: he alone among his peers has a sensitivity to injustice and exploitation of power, to a degree we soon see should put his parents and their peers to shame. Michele is the conscience of the film - and of Italy and of us all.

After Michele walks across a tall beam high up in a rickety old barn-like structure at the deserted farmhouse as punishment, the group is seen going home. As Michele and his sister ride home, she asks him where her glasses are, and he goes back to fetch them. While searching for these glasses in the farmhouse, Michele discovers a hole in the ground covered with a sheet of metal. He opens it and sees part of a bare leg; horrified, due to the limited time he had to investigate the situation, he decides to keep it a secret from the gang, he feels threatned by Skull and doesn't want such a big discovery to be taken away from him.The next day he returns to the site, throwing rocks at the leg. As he moves to pick up another rock, the camera pans to him, on the ground, searching around him in the dirt, where he finds another rock to throw. As the camera pans back into the hole, the leg is out of sight. Startled, Michele is suddenly staring down at a zombie-like young boy stumbling out of the darkness and into view. Terrified, Michele hurries home once more. Michele visits the zombie-boy again, and finds that he is actually alive, however, he is very weak. Michele brings him water and later food, making sure that his presence is not discovered by whoever put the boy there each time.

Michele's undaunted curiosity leads him to begin questioning the confused, possibly delusional, and traumatized boy. He believes himself to be dead and asks Michele if he is his guardian angel. Then one night, Michele sees his parents watching on TV news that a child named Filippo has been kidnapped from Milan, and the boy in the pictures shown looks just like the boy in the hole. His parents are hosting late-night meetings with the parents of his playmates and one domineering visitor "from the North" who now sleeps in his room. Michele gradually comes to realize that his own father is involved in the kidnapping, as well as some other men in the town. He continues visiting Filippo (Mattia di Pierro) and one day he lets him out for some hours of play in the wheatfields together, and then he returns him back to the hole. To win a toy as present for Filippo, he barters his best friend Salvatore for a toy blue van by offering to share a secret. He tells Salvatore of Filippo's existence, but Salvatore shows discomfort with the story, albeit surrendering the van and promising Michele that he will not reveal the secret to anyone.

But on his next visit to Filippo, Michele is apprehended by one of the kidnappers (disliked older brother of Skull), who catches him in the hole with Filippo and punches him, then hauls him out and drives him home. Michele's friend Salvatore turns out to have revealed his secret to Skull's brother, a realization that brings betrayal into the story and now isolates our central protagonist as having no one he can confide in or trust among parents or peers. His parents do have contrasting reactions to his being apprehended. His mother defies Michele's attacker in defense of her son. But his father, upon learning that he has been visiting Filippo, threatens to beat him if he ever goes back to visit the kid again. Michele vows to oblige his father. But then one day Skull cajoles his peers into again visiting the farmhouse, where Michele discovers the hole empty and Filippo gone. His friend-turned-betrayor Salvatore readily tells him he knows where Filippo has been moved, having overheard his father tell Michele's father, and will tell him if Michele will forgive his betrayal. The next night, Michele overhears the adults in the film discussing who will kill Filippo, and Michele sets out immediately to find Filippo -- in a "cave" and save him, boosting him out and telling him to run for his life while Michele tries to find a way out for himself with no footing to boost him over the gate. Meanwhile, Michele's father has drawn the short match and shows up at the cave to kill Filippo. Michele sees it is his father and runs toward him across the cave just as his father fires his gun, shooting his own son's leg. In the film's last scene, Michele's father runs with Michele in his arms in search of medical aid as the ringleader from the "North" (Milan) finds him and insists he has to resume his assigned task, killing Filippo. Filippo appears and risks his own danger to show gratitude to Michele, just as helicopters arrive and track down the ringleader trying to escape. The film ends with the repentant father clutching his son and Michele reaching out to Filippo.