Diaz: Un crime d'état

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" ...

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).

When you ever wished you had participated in a happy leftie mass event - watch that movie. The camera gave me the whole time the feeling of being part of the crowd on the screen, just there in the school building, between all the funny people - the guy who plays flamenco guitar, some Manu Chao song, the pop-up band, people just dancing - all of them who want to make the world a better place. A lot of languages are used all over the movie, people act like like real people do, it's just fine. This is the first part. Everything afterward, as we know, is of extreme brutality, and I was happy that I had never been part in that leftie mass event. I really liked the movie how it was make, technically. It's only a pity that a lot of answers are not given. It would have been helpful to work out more of the backgrounds. The extreme force of the police, where did it come from? There must have been a lot of hate and fear a long time in advance. We don't get to know much about the really violent left wing and how far the police was able or willing to make a difference between them and the average wild-haired, guitar-playing and further peaceful demonstrators. So, I missed some different points of view besides just the picture of peaceful lefties. But when you realize that everything really has happened like this, the the world is maybe less subtle some times. And that makes me shiver.

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.

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.