Diaz: Un crime d'état

Seriously. I walked out of it somewhat disorientated and still shaken. I saw 'Diaz - Don't clean up this Blood' about a month ago at its Berlinale Screening and it still haunts me. I could tell that most of the audience shared my feelings and some even left the cinema, because they couldn't bear what they were seeing. Nevertheless the applause was extraordinary.

We have all seen our fair share of violence and cruelty in the movies. But this is a completely different pair of shoes. The non-fictional background of the film plot concerns me personally, both as a human being and as an European citizen. It's hard to imagine this happened ten years ago in a Western European country and yet it DID happen and it could - and probably will - happen again. That's why it is so important to deal with the topic of police violence instead of ignoring it or playing it down. The film crew and cast did a great job capturing the horror of this disastrous event. And that's what 'Diaz' mainly seems to be about: re-creating and contextualizing the occurred violations of human rights in 2001 in Italy as authentic and accurate as it can be done in a feature film.

It obviously wants you to be shocked, but with good reasons: it describes shocking incidents, which should not be trivialized. If you do some research, you'll find out that the film indeed does not exaggerate anything. But it does NOT inform you about the political background, you have to inform yourself. And I think you will, after you've seen it.

'Diaz' is not entirely flawless, but it could be a film of great significance, provided that it motivates the audience to read up on the subject.

If you're interested in a less gripping, but much more informative approach on the matter, check out the documentary "The Summit" (2012).

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.

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.

What happened on that day and is portrayed in the movie is nothing new.

All of us have seen what happened in Abu Ghraib, concentration camps, even on socker matches or concerns... we all know that people behave like swine when they are given the opportunity and even worse, when they are in "authority" (in any sense).

I have tried to read a book by psychologist Philip Zimbardo, that explains the topic of violence brought in common people if they are given an order or authority to do so... couldn't, it didn't feel realistic enough to follow. I saw the Experiment, based on his work and didn't find it realistic again - it felt like fiction.

Than this movie came. I seriously would make it an obligatory part of police and soldier training. To show them what they can become if they don't watch themselves... I would show it on psychology lessons to make the students understand that the beast in us is very much alive. Its a movie that partly kills the "humans are nice" mindset, but sometimes it needs to be done - the risks of forgetting are too high.

When I left the cinema I was thinking if there is anything that can be done from MY side to prevent such things from happening... All i came to was to be good - to spread the feeling of connection with strangers, to try and make any matter personal. This movie made me consider joining the police just to see and try to not allow anything like this to happen. Thank you for this, I don't know what will be my role, but movies like this make me realize, that living for my own self is just not enough (one day I might be sorry for doing so.. if I find myself on the wrong end of the baton).

In Late April 2009, I got a call in London to come to Genova to meet several mystery guests who wanted to meet me and several of the other Diaz victims. I was coming anyway to see Dr Zucca (The Genova prosecutor) but I was intrigued to find out who the mystery guests were. I met Domenico Procacci and Daniele Vicari in Genova at the Via San Luca office (where the Diaz case is archived) in late May for a 'secret weekend meeting' after the Cannes Film Festival.

At the time, I did not know who Procacci and Vicari were but I was told they were the best film producer and director in Italy and they wanted to make a movie of the raid on Diaz during the G8. I had seen Gomorrah, Procacci's mafia film and thought it was brilliant. Using this film as a comparison, I listened to what Domenico wanted to say to all of us present. Procacci explained to us that he had wanted to make a multi-million euro film about the raid for a long time but had been prevented because the trial process against the police.

He was willing to risk a lot of money on the project and we could all see that Domenico and Daniele were committed to making the movie. I personally told them that whilst I had a lot of personal confidence, I thought the Diaz police would try and stop the project or the right ring politicians like Berlusconi or Fini my sue Fandango. I also told them that Diaz is still live court case and that they had to do a lot of research.

After all of us from Diaz consulted with each other, we gave Domenico Procacci and Daniele Vicari permission to make the film. All of us were taking a risk allowing a production company like fandango access to the video evidence & photos and documents involved in the trial. However, we all felt that the story of the raid and what we had lived through had to be told to the rest of the world.

What is unusual about the Diaz movie was that there was no script in existence, so Fandango commissioned Laura Paolucci to spend two years writing a script. The end result is a pulp fiction style film which is 80% true to the story of Diaz. Obviously, Vicari could not go into detail about the entire G8 which forms the backdrop for the beginning of the film but I think Vicari has done an almost perfect job of marrying together true events with a few high drama fictional characters.

I think the combination of powerful high impact footage, recreated scenes and the chance of lifting the lift on the inside of the anti-globalization movement makes Diaz the movie a special film. The 2001 G8 was the biggest and worst riot in Europe in 60 years. To complete the film, Vicari has combined the usual high quality style of Italian film screening to capture this important moment of history, making it one of the best, most talked about and most controversial films to come out of Italy in 20 years.

Only after the film had premiered in Berlin did I learn that Procacci had said that Diaz had been his most challenging and complicated film to make…with Vicari in agreement.

My story is played by an Italian actor Pietro Ragusa and my almost death is one of the penultimate scenes in the movie. Because I ran out of Diaz, I took the full force of Canterini's unit, the 7th Mobile heavy riot unit that had specially trained for the Genova G8 summit. Pietro's part is almost as it exactly happened and I am very happy despite the scene is one of the most harrowing.