MAFIA IS NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE

 

Fandango: Sales

A production: Ila Palma-Dream Film, Tramp Limited, Rai Cinema

Genre: Documentary

Runtime: 109' min

Country: Italy

Director: Franco Meresco
Screenplay Uliano Greca, Francesco Guttuso, Giuliano La Franca , Franco Maresco, Claudia Uzzo
Director of Photography Tommaso Lusena
Editing Francesco Guttuso, Franco Maresco, Edoardo Morabito
Music Salvatore Bonafede

Cast Letizia Battaglia, Ciccio Mira, Matteo Mannino, Cristian Miscel, Franco Zecchin


In 2017, 25 years after the Mafia’s massacres at Capaci and Via D’Amelio, Franco Maresco decides to make a new film. The idea is given impetus by a work at that time completed recently, and dedicated to the photographer Letizia Battaglia, defined by The New York Times in 2017 as one of the “eleven women” who have left their mark on our time. He feels the need to combine Letizia, in parallel, with a figure as strong as it is peripheral, from the other side of the fence: Ciccio Mira, the leading character in 2014’s Belluscone. Una storia siciliana. The “legendary” organizer of popular street festivals, capable of inspiring a particular “empathy” in spite of his
nostalgic ideas of the Mafia as it used to be, Mira has changed over these few years, and now he seems to seek redemption, as a man and as a manager. But the leopard cannot change its spots. He takes “care” of a new pupil, the young Cristian Miscel, often subject to psychotic episodes, especially when his mother and his impresario cannot guarantee his time on stage; and wants to organize a unique event at Zen, “I neolomelodici per Falcone e Borsellino” (The neolomelodics for Falcone and Borsellino), on the occasion of the celebrations commemorating the two martyrs killed by the Mafia…