In the rural Italy of I'm Not Scared, the sun and the endless expanses of grain seem like they're competing to look most golden. Even the area's children appear to recognize that they live in a place blessed with unnatural beauty. As the film opens in the golden summer of 1978, they spend their days frolicking through the fields like figures in a kitschy painting.
Only 10-year-old protagonist Giuseppe Cristiano seems aware of a world beyond an eternal present. When he watches one playmate subject another to the everyday cruelties of childhood, the flash in his eyes suggests a growing awareness of right and wrong and a need to stay on the side of virtue regardless of the consequences. Of course, some consequences are easier to anticipate than others. When Cristiano encounters a bleary-eyed boy his age (Mattia Di Pierro) living in chains in an abandoned cellar, taking care of him immediately seems like the right choice. But when he starts to catch his father and his friends whispering in huddles, and the news begins to report the kidnapping of a wealthy family's son, it becomes clear that his good deed might cost him more than he'd planned.
Director Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo) attempts to dramatize Crisitano's slow evolution into a moral being through incident and suggestion, but the film evokes lecture notes on Lawrence Kohlberg more readily than childhood experience. Cinematographer Italo Petriccione gives the film a dramatic look, but that never compensates for the lack of actual drama; when so much of the conflict concerns Cristiano's reluctance to betray his father, it might have helped to spend more time on exploring that relationship than on capturing what light looks like when it pours in from a cellar door.