Shooting the Mafia

Bored with the constant tripe, recycled movies and average trash being pumped out at present, so I decided to turn to documentaries.

This is an absolute gem. I loved how it was put together. Never a dull moment. A little bit of an emotional rollercoaster too. This is a must see for anyone who enjoys good, interesting and compelling stories. Also anyone interested in history. Especially Sicilian mafia history.

Everyone knows something about the Sicilian Mafia (Cosa Nostra), right? But many don't know the true horrors that went on under their rule for centuries and the endless murders/executions. This film only skims the surface of some of the horrors that took place from around the 70's onwards under the Corleonesi Mafia clan.

Photojournalist Letizia Battaglia's story intertwined with the Corleonesi mafia was really well done in my opinion. It's a fantastic piece of filmmaking and had me glued. Her photography is amazing and also disturbing. Much of it she is not proud of and some photos she doesn't even remember taking. She has never had an easy life but has no regrets, it seems.

I could have watched another straight hour or two of this but I believe the story is well presented/edited in the time shown. It has opened my eyes to the director Kim Longinotto and I'd love to see more of her work.

'Shooting the Mafia' is a documentary that tells the story of the life of a woman who is our contemporary, but whose biography is very different from that of most people around her and us. The merit of the Irish director Kim Longinotto is that she chose a non- conventional way of bring on screen an extraordinary biography. The combination of a special subject and of an exciting way to make movies makes of 'Shooting the Mafia' a captivating film, which also enters in a polemic with the way the the Sicilian Mafia is presented on the screen.It's a story we seem to know from films like 'The Godfather', but here we see it from another perspective.

Letizia Battaglia's biography covers all of Italy's modern history since the Second World War. The Sicilian teenager is raised in a strict atmosphere by a tyrant father. She accepts to get married at age 16 with the first man she was proposed to, in order to leave the house where she was secluded. Soon she gives birth and she grows up two daughters up to the age of maturity, like a typical Italian domestic woman, whom the man does not allow to learn or to practice a profession out of their home. Her re- birth of the person takes place when she is about 40 years old, but she will will take revenge on life as they say, divorcing, maintaining numerous relationships with men (many of them younger), and working as a photojournalist at a newspaper in Palermo . Here she will soon come in contact with the sordid realities of poverty and corruption, but especially with the violent society dominated by Cosa Nostra (the name of the Sicilian mob). She will photograph the murders in blood soaked pictures, become a friend of the judges who are trying to fight the phenomenon and who are murdered one after another, and she will get involved in politics when it becomes apparent that journalism activism is no longer enough. This is the biography of a special woman of great courage. The feminist message and the political criticism of violence, corruption, and especially fear are combined directly and expressively.

In order to bring the story of Battaglia's life on the screen, director Kim Longinotto has film sequences, photographs made by Battaglia throughout her work (many of them filled with violence, but of remarkable expressiveness and quality) and testimonies of her own and of those who have surrounded and accompanied her throughout her life (among which some of her former lovers, but also the current one). For the first period of her life, when she was not in front of the film or photo cameras, sequences from the films of the Neo-realistic era of post-war Italian cinema were used. The result is a documentary that is never boring, from a visual or from a message point of view. The spectators get the portrait of a strong and courageous woman who had the power to change the course of her life, to overcome the social and gender prejudices, to love and work in a profession she taught herself in which she excelled, a woman who has not remained indifferent to suffering around her, a woman who has done and continues to do all she knows and can do to correct injustice. 'Shooting the Mafia' is an interesting documentary and a remarkable cinematic portrait. It's also a condemnation of organized crime, showing its the real sordid face, very different from the glamor it gets in some of the Hollywood movies.

"The first woman (news) photographer in Italy," says Letizia Battaglia of herself.

If Letizia is not that, she is the most daring and outspoken of the bunch. If like me you have some Sicilian DNA in your makeup, you'll want to see this intrepid photographer in Shooting the Mafia begin her career with Wegee-like street photographs and then slip into depicting the Sicilian curse of the Mafia, whose bloody business makes The Irishman look like a school picnic.

Documentarian Kim Longinotto has a similar gift capturing the aging red-headed Battaglia as she reminisces about the Cosa Nostra's corrosive effect on Sicily. In addition, she shows her challenges making their images of brutality meaningful, as well as her many love affairs, some of whom appear in the doc.

In all it's a full look at the robust and dangerous life of Sicily seen through a Pentax and video cameras. The images that don't work as effectively are the large crowd scenes of demonstrators protesting the Mafia. Sometimes, there are images even closer up that don't quite fit the narrative. A shot of Mount Vesuvius erupting goes too far the other way, figuratively speaking.

No moment in this doc is dull; images are powerful. The film at times cross edits shots of Battaglia as a lovely, animated young woman who tells us of her burden being a young mother not allowed to break through education to a more expansive life.

This engrossing doc is pervaded by the undaunted spirit of Battaglia. She is a modern feminist heroine, a companion to the current Little Women. She fearlessly looks in the Mafia's face and photographs it for the world to see the evil that has been in Sicily for centuries. Come to think of it, Shooting the Mafia is also an illustrative companion to the current Irishman and the legendary Godfather.

Also read Theresa Maggio's The Stone Boudoir: Travels Through the Hidden Villages of Italy for a benign view of this beautiful country sans gangsters.

Even for old jaded me, further insights abound, such as my realization that respect is a building block of the Sicilian character. Young men are shown acting out becoming part of the mob, looking to become someone who is admired as he strolls the streets. For me, I now know why I demand a swift return to my emails: respect!

"Photographing trauma is embarrassing." Battaglia

The title of this documentary is misleading. It is not directly about the mafia but about the biography of the photographer. It seems she has had a strange life but it is very difficult to decipher as stories from her past are suggested and not clearly put together. There is no clear milestones to help follow a clear timeline of what is happening in her life, so it ends up becoming a very confused autobiography where a hectic love life and blurry career moves are mixed incoherently to form some kind of feminist testimony told by a red hair grandma. As far as the "mafia" pictures, it seems she spent most of her life taking shots of mafia victims. Not sure this was the best way to spend 1:34min of my life.

The use of old movie clips felt heavily contrived and only worked 20% of the time. While I know Letizia had hard, unfortunate relationships with men and has a strong feminist side to her Kim's overt attempt to bring that side of Letizia to the fore also felt forced and takes away from the subject at hand - her photography and the power her images had and still have towards raising awareness and motivating societal change. I wish the film was helmed by someone else more capable of telling this important story.