Diaz: Un crime d'état

A KVIFF viewing, an Italian film from director Daniele Vicari, the film undertakes a sticky task to recount the fierce police assault on the so-called black-bloc group (mostly foreigners, students, journalists) after some protesters' affray in the final days of 2001 G8 Summit in Genova.

The film's chief characteristic is its visual language, shockingly bold and deadly savage, which inevitably will be shunned by the demography of those are intolerable of graphic violence. One must admit, we are now in the era where news generally fade away in a 48-hour rotation, there are myriads of mostly recent "unfortunate incidents" have been erased from our mind, so as to this film takes a quite extreme measurement to remind us such horrifying and atrocious events did actually exist only a decade ago in a developed western country, with government authorities holding the reins.

The very first scene, is a backward slow-motion of a protester slinging an empty bottle toward the police vehicles which are deliberately passing by the area, in order to procure a professed pretext to carry out the subsequent battery, so allegedly the entire action is ruthlessly plotted to set an example and to hector the masses. Two-thumbs up to the valor of the film, which fearlessly exposes the dark side of the government and the powerlessness of individual. But when the said slow-motion has been exploited multiple times, a dwindling impact inexorably occurs each time it recurs.

Due to the fact the approach of depicting this scandalizing event in a multi-reflective manner, it entails a wide range of characters, local volunteers, various foreigners (among those are many innocent victims and the real peace-breakers who ironically evade the brute force), policemen who execute the operation, The numerous cast diffuses one's concentration while most roles are underwritten and loosely connected or fragmented, nevertheless Jennifer Ulrich gives a gutsy impression as a victim traumatized both outside and inside, Claudio Santamaria, also stands out among the bulk of cast, as the righteous Italian policeman who is more of a reluctant witness than a government's henchman or heavy.

Anyway, with excellent editing, sound effects and a steady camera eye, the film is a quite mature work, on which one definitely could ruminate and alert oneself to be more conscious of the tragic happenings, they are just around us, be wise and be careful.

In July of 2001, over 200.000 people took to the streets of Genoa in protest against a meeting of the G8 - the group of the worlds' eight most powerful industrial countries whose summit decisions were to have a global impact on the world. In the aftermath of the protest, there were hundreds of injured, and 23-year-old activist Carlo Giuliani was killed when he confronted a Carabinieri vehicle. He was shot with a firearm and was ran over twice by a police Land Rover.

Day after this big anti-globalist protests in Genoa, the police organized a night raid on the Diaz school, where the temporary headquarters of the Genoa Social Forum was located, alongside with Indymedia - an independent media organization, as well as activist lawyers who provided free legal services to protest participants and collected documentation on the police brutality during the protests. At the moment when 500 members of the police and carabinieri stormed the building, there were around one hundred people sleeping inside, among them many journalists and young people who came from different European countries to take part in the protest.

The film relies on documentary material and depicts these events extremely realistically, especially the atrocious police beating of everyone they came across in the building, seriously wounding many people, causing some to sustain life-critical injuries and even coma. Those who did not end up on the life support in the hospital were arrested and transferred to a police barracks where they were abused and brutally tortured for several more days.

In addition to extreme brutality against activists, police destroyed a large amount of computer and media equipment, took all hard drives and destroyed all cameras they found in the building. After that, police officers went on to set up a false evidence campaign aiming to present this school as a black block stronghold, as well as an improvised hospital for people with existing injuries from the protests.

It is important to understand that this attack wasn't accidental in any way. It was planned at the highest levels of police and government. Besides destroying computer equipment and evidence against the police, the goal was to criminalize the movement and instigate a media lynching, but also to deeply traumatize a large number of activists and thus passivize or break the protest movement.

The gruesome police violence during the Diaz raid that is presented can be compared with the cult film "The Strawberry Statement", which covers the Columbia University protests of 1968 and the brutal intervention of the US Police and National Guard.

Particularly interesting is the fact that afterward no police officer was tried for torture, because in 2001 the Italian law did not recognize torture as a criminal offense. Movie scenes of humiliation and torture that took place after the transfer of the arrestees into the police barracks are irresistibly reminiscent of films about military-fascist dictatorships in Latin America. It's the same politics, the same method, the same interests.

This film should be a kind of a lesson to anyone involved in any protest or social movements. Know what to expect if a protest actually jeopardizes someone's interests - in the sense that every social conflict is part of the struggle between social classes. Although this struggle is mainly of low intensity, contended to individual strikes and protests, if a movement actually threatens the interests of the ruling class, the conflict will soon turn into a class war in which the ruling class won't choose the means, nor heed to victims.

It is therefore crucial to understand the class nature of the society we live in, and the implications it has. One certainly shouldn't be naive and think that the state and the police have anything to do with law or justice.

Sometimes you see a movie about something was really happened. And you were there, at that time. And you don't want to forget. You want nobody will forget. I think this movie is well done, maybe not a real artistic masterpiece, but I don't think this was the target for the director. The real target was just to document real fact as they happened. And if facts were not really that way the director and the producer would surely have problems with law. No problems happened. Sadly, I would prefer to know that this film was fictional and the policemen did their job in the right and humane way. I would really like "Diaz" was just a fiction. But it is not. By the way, I'm from Genova and I was there at the time. Not inside Diaz school, fortunately.

Let's make something perfectly clear before you watch this movie. If you didn't like the police before this movie, you won't for sure not like the police afterwards. The police is NOT your friend. They are the puppets of the people in power, and those people are corrupt to the bone. That's noting new, it's like that in almost every country. But to see that this happened in a "civilized" country like Italy is just repulsive and makes me sick to the stomach. Police brutality, it's not new, and it won't stop because of this movie. The proof, while I write this, is the current manifestations of the "Yellow Jackets" in France where we witness systematic daily police brutality, shooting flashballs in peoples faces, beating up everybody that stands in their way. The media trying to cover up all this police brutality are all on the payroll of the government. The independent media is the only one you can trust. And that's exactly what they show in this movie, extreme police violence and independent journalists trying to do their jobs. The movie is very hard to watch, and that's only if you have some feelings left when you witness injustice. Those right wing pigs should all be in prison, but the truth is that none of them even lost their job. Just like twenty years later where a Parisian cop gets the medal of honor after beating up innocents while on the other hand a citizen is in prison for beating up one of those robocops with his bare fists. A must watch if you want to try to understand how the police works if you're still living in a bubble on your cloud.

The movie says: Don't clean up the mess, as in let the world see what happened. As you can tell by that, the movie is based on true events. Very harrowing and very powerful. The performances are pitch perfect. Small events enroll and you can see that something big will happen. The movie emphasizes that one scene is very important (one event if you wanna call it that) and it gets repeated. Now don't judge the movie on the bad cgi in that scene, if you can.

And as the other reviewer has said, it might have its flaws, but its message is very clear and it should have played at the big screen at the Berlin International Film Festival. The other reviewer also stated there's another movie called Summit, which I know will seek, which seems to be reveal even more of what happened, but more in a documentary style. This one reminded me a bit of the American movie "Battle in Seattle" ...