photograph - courtesy
La Biennale di Venezia
La Biennale di Venezia - Film Festival
La Mafia non e piu quella di una volta – Franco Maresco
In 2017, 25 years after the Capaci and Via D’Amelio bombings, Franco
Maresco decided to make a new film. He found the stimulus to do this in a
recent work he had dedicated to Letizia
Battaglia, the photographer now in her eighties who has used her pictures
to tell the story of the Mafia wars,
she was included in The New York Times
2017 list of eleven powerful women around the world. Maresco in La Mafia non e piu quella di una volta –
Mafia Is Not What It Used to Be - felt the need to feature alongside Letizia a
figure from the other side of the fence: Ciccio
Mira, the ‘legendary’ organiser of street parties who is seeking
redemption, as man and as manager, to the point of organising a singular event
at the Zen in Palermo: a concert of Neomelodic
singers for Falcone and Borsellino. His words betray a certain
nostalgia for “the old-time Mafia.” Meanwhile, as they attend the celebrations
staged in memory of the martyrs of the fight against the Mafia, Maresco’s skepticism
provides a marked contrast with Battaglia’s passion.
Starring: Letizia
Battaglia, Ciccio Mira.
Ciccio Mira
Photograph Tommaso Lusena -
courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
"This film is the inevitable follow-up to Belluscone. Una storia siciliana,
presented at Venice in 2014. I have to admit that it has not been at all easy,
five years later, to go back to telling a story with Neomelodic singers and the
Mafia in it again. I have the sensation, however, of having gone further than
in the previous film. Into a territory in which the distinction between good
and evil, between Mafia and anti-Mafia, has been erased and everything, now,
has lapsed into a spectacle with no end and without any meaning."
Franco Maresco
Director’s
statement
Letizia Battaglia and Franco Maresco
photograph - courtesy
La Biennale di Venezia
Letizia Battaglia
Contessanally: Grande Letizia!