Cortile Cascino

Director Michael Roemer made this documentary about a slum in Palermo, Sicily, for NBC in 1961. NBC never aired it. I saw it years later in a film class at which Roemer showed up and talked about it.

The houses had no running water. They fetched water from one outside spigot. They shat on a railroad track that ran through the center of the slum and occasionally someone would get killed when a train came through. The men got occasional work from the Mafia. The women struggled to raise their children.

The stories of the slum-dwellers are raw and well-told.

It was also titled 'Inferno'.

Robert M. Young returned 30 years later to follow up on some of the people in the documentary 'Children of Fate'.