Zucchero – Sugar Fornaciari (Zucchero Sugar Fornaciari)
Italy 2023

Opening 26 Sep 2024

Directed by: Giangiacomo de Stefano, Valentina Zanella
Writing credits: Federico Fava, Valentina Zanella, Giangiacomo de Stefano

For those not familiar with the name, Zucchero (his stage name meaning “sugar”) Fornaciari, he is a renowned Italian singer-songwriter-musician with a career spanning musical influences over four decades of rock, blues, soul, and gospel. Most of all, and because of the music he wrote/performed, Zucchero is considered the “father of Italian blues.” Even as Valentina Zanella and Giangiacomo De Stefano’s documentary opens in cinemas across Germany, so too is Zucchero touring the Overdose D'Amore World Tour.

Francisco Guccini Fornaciari’s small-town rural upbringing rang with normality in Roncocesi, near Emilia-Romagna, Italy and the seaside town of Forte dei Marmi in Tuscany. Sugar earned his nickname at school from a teacher, played the organ, and served as an altar boy in the local church; he shared a special closeness with his paternal grandmother. Sting and Bono (U2 lead singer) regard him as “…more ancient of a soul.” In New Orleans Sugar, taken with how music was everywhere, comments about “Blues is the devil’s music,” referencing the legendary Mississippi Delta blues performer, Robert Johnson. In his early teens, a Black friend introduced Sugar to soul music, he began writing songs and then learning instruments. Fellow Italian Corrado Rustica and Zucchero met in San Francisco in 1975, later laying an album in one week. Together with Randy Jackson they cut the very successful “Rispetto” album in 1986. Zucchero Sugar’s list of collaborators is like reading the “Who’s Who” of Blues-Soul-Rock: Eric Clapton remarks on “the mad hatter …. with his leathery voice;” Jim Horn contributes how touring, “Zucchero knows exactly what he wants … hears music in his head;” Pavarotti and others call him the “great storyteller.” Zucchero’s honest about his period of depression and its reason, the price of success, and life-lessons learnt.

Corrado Iuvara’s phenomenal editing’s seamless transitions back/forth between time periods is absorbing and the impetus, together with Zucchero’s music, for this richly structured documentary. Massimo Moschin’s cinematography and Alberto Marras’ sound design fills out the volume. Needless to add, Zucchero Sugar’s “unique signature” is, besides his fantastic music, his larger than life, sweet charismatic personality. (Marinell Haegelin)