The plot deepens

Time was when the glinting, stylised New York skyline which is the Miramax logo would have made your heart beat a little bit faster as it appeared on the screen announcing a new feature.

Nowadays, however, following its remorseless absorption into the production line of the Disney Dream Factory, the film company's name just makes me envisage Harvey Weinstein's big fat rear about to dump more eye-crap on my face. Which is why I'm Not Scared is such a revelation. Miramax may have only snaffled it up at a film festival and secured its international distribution, but we have reason to be thankful for that alone.

Gabriele Salvatores, the Italian director of this small, subtitled gem, won the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film of 1992, with his gently subversive take on the Second World War, Mediterraneo. While that film had a nice conceit - timorous Italian soldiers evade the war on an isolated Greek island, where they fall in love with the lusty inhabitants and their sensual lifestyle - neither its direction nor its photography, script or acting, are a patch on I'm Not Scared.

It is an axiom of creative talent that once its possessor has discovered how he does what he does, he often becomes bored with doing it. But on the basis of these two films, separated by a decade, Salvatore is still a protean creature.

The idea of using a child's perspective on the adult world to expose its vain conceit is a hardy perennial of both literature and film. From Henry James's What Maisie Knew, to Whistle Down the Wind, the naïve eye has furnished trenchant and uncomfortable truths. At the centre of I'm Not Scared stands 10-year-old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano), the son of a dirt-poor southern Italian family, whose crumbling house is lost in a sea of vast corn fields.

By day, he runs free with his gang of friends, cycling down the rutted tracks or racing through the crops. But when evening comes, he returns to his distracted mother, Anna (Aitana S·nchez-Gijón) and evasive father, Pino (Dino Abbrescia). On the surface, the parents' treatment of Michele and his younger sister Maria (Giulia Matturro), isn't particularly suspicious. Yes, Pino only communicates with the boy through inappropriate gifts and arm wrestling, while Anna alternates between cloying propinquity and stressed neglect, but all parents behave like this some of the time, and some all of it.

As the story unfolds, we find out that this seeming normalcy is just that; and that far from the parents' behaviour falling within acceptable margins, they are in fact putting on an impressive performance in the face of truly appalling events. Events that they are key players in.

I don't want to give away any more of the plot of I'm Not Scared, because my hunch is that anyone who enjoys the unfolding of a suspenseful narrative, but doesn't require over-the-top shoot-outs or car-chases to jack up their adrenaline levels, will love it.

MUCH of t he delight is visual. Salvatore and his cinematographer, Italo Petriccione, have responded to the vast skies and undulating landscape of Basilicata and Puglia by cutting between sustained long shots that show the human lost in the natural world, and precise closeups that reveal the natural enclosed in the artificial: a curl of smoke from a mosquito coil, a thrush on Michele's bedside table, the ants swarming over his eyes after he falls off his bike.

When the camera does move, it is as the protagonist moves: at a low-level run, simulating his path through the fields, or his standpoint as he stares down into a pit of unspeakable revelations. Michele, Maria, and all the other children in this film, were played by local amateurs, and it is difficult to see how Salvatore could