Director Antonio Piazza Fabio Grassadonia poses with the cast and crew of the competing film “Iddu” (Sicilian Letters) scheduled to screen at the 81st Venice Film Festival, Venice, Italy, September 5, 2024 | Photo Credit: Reuters
The Mafia makes its presence felt Venice Film Festival This year, with a film inspired by the Boss Matteo Messina DenaroWho died last year after being on the run for three decades.
That long period as a fugitive — in which he was aided by family, loyalists and possibly more powerful political forces — is “a dark page in the history of Italy,” said Fabio Grassadonia, who co-directed “Sicilian Letters,” which premiered at the festival on Thursday, with director Antonio Piazza.
Both Sicilian filmmakers told AFP They sought to understand how Messina Denaro was able to operate underground for so long before his arrest in January 2023 and his death from cancer while in prison in September.
“These reasons are not only due to the intelligence or skill of the fugitive, but are much deeper rooted in the system that revolves around him, the system of small people who help him, but also the strong forces that support him,” Mr. Grassadonia said.
Messina Denaro was one of the most ruthless bosses of Cosa Nostra, the real Sicilian crime syndicate depicted in the “Godfather” films.
The 61-year-old was convicted of involvement in the 1992 murders of anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and deadly bombings in Rome, Florence and Milan in 1993, while one of his six life sentences was for the kidnapping and murder of the 12-year-old son of a witness in the Falcone case.
He disappeared during the Italian government’s crackdown on Sicilian gangsters in the summer of 1993, and remained at the top of Italy’s most wanted list, gradually becoming a legend.
His decision to undergo treatment for colon cancer led to his arrest on January 16, 2023, while on his way to a clinic in Palermo.
The directors said they would be unable to comment on the Mafia until Italy cleaned up its past.
“This is a country that has not yet told the truth about this criminal incident,” Mr. Grassadonia said.
He said, “And until the truth comes out, we will keep going around the same things, we will keep repeating the past that never ends and which becomes the present…”
But today this search for truth has been overshadowed by the enormous financial influence of the Mafia.
The “billions of euros that support the economy” make it “difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish where the clean economy begins and the dirty economy ends,” Mr. Grassadonia said.
‘Swamp’
In the film, central character Matteo (played by Elio Germano) continues to manage the Mafia’s affairs from his apartment hideout.
He communicates with his family and henchmen through the so-called “Pizzini” network – messages written on pieces of paper to secure communications between him and his comrades, which are burned after being read.
Reluctantly helping the police catch Matteo is Catello, a wisecracking former politician and headmaster with questionable morals, played by Toni Servillo, star of Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film “The Great Beauty.”
Mr. Grassadonia said that while Servillo’s character is “undoubtedly an immoral man,” his morality is “brighter than Matteo’s dark and dark morality.”
The directors said that through the interactions between the two characters they hoped to highlight “a certain Italian socio-cultural fabric.”
The film is the directors third film based on Mafia.
“We wanted to talk about this quagmire we’ve become stagnant in,” Mr. Piazza said.
“We must continue to tell it, because otherwise we will face a phenomenon of repression,” he said, which will not move the country forward.
“We are confident because we feel that, like us, there are people in other fields who are constantly trying to have conversations, ask questions and find answers,” he said.
“There are still so many questions that either had no answers — or whose answers were so simple they couldn’t be true.”
Published – September 07, 2024 12:02 pm IST