Sobriety, narrative and representative effectiveness in two works that yesterday at the Taormina Film Festival focused the debate on two complementary aspects of justice: the fight against organized crime and the controversial issue of the possibility of rehabilitation of prisoners. Two great Sicilian storytellers, Pasquale Scimeca and Aurelio Grimaldi, met the press to present their latest films «Il giudice e il boss» and «La rieducazione».
The Judge and the Boss – an Arbash production with Rai Cinema – focuses on the work of Judge Cesare Terranova (Gaetano Bruno) and Police Marshal Lenin Mancuso (Peppino Mazzotta) and highlights significant aspects of their battle against the boss Luciano Liggio (Claudio Castrogiovanni), which led to the trial against the Corleonesi that took place in Bari in 1969, and which, with a different outcome, could have prevented the great mafia massacres of the following years. A film defined by the director himself as necessary: «After the story of the peasant world of “Placido Rizzotto” and the one on Fra Biagio Conte (“Biagio”), the missing link in my cinema in chapters was precisely Terranova and Mancuso, because by following the Corleonesi and Liggio they discover that the mafia has left the countryside to move to the city, even going outside of Sicily, beyond the “palm line” described by Sciascia. It was necessary to tell a historical moment that is missing from historiography and cinematography on the Mafia, but equally important to focus on the two figures from a human point of view, because Terranova taught a new investigative methodology to Falcone, Borsellino and other magistrates and Mancuso, together with Boris Giuliano, to policemen like Cassarà and Beppe Montana».
An intense preparatory work, an in-depth study of the characters, therefore, to bring out their professional and human stature. An acting challenge for Gaetano Bruno, interpreter of Terranova, who met with the director and the relatives of Terranova and Mancuso to build the character: «I wanted to find facets linked to a particular way of conceiving the work: a continuous laying of the foundations of the intervention in a ruthless way, while respecting the people he was investigating».
The film was written by Scimeca with the journalist Attilio Bolzoni and the collaboration of the writer from Messina Nadia Terranova, a distant relative of the judge.
The theme of prisoners’ rights and their re-education provided for by Article 27 of the Constitution in Aurelio Grimaldi’s film La rieducazione. A work in progress where reality and fiction merge, echoing the mockumentary genre. Inspired by the director’s experiences as a teacher in the Malaspina juvenile prison in Palermo, it narrates the re-education, never actually happened, of Totò Riina, locked up in 41bis, by Prof. Dario Di Vita, played by Grimaldi himself and his alter ego. The face of the Capo dei Capi is the Palermo native Tony Sperandeo, who wrote the dialogues with the director.
The fulfillment of a dream for Grimaldi, who told the press how the sacred fire of passion sonorously ignores the risk of “impossible missions”. “A unique film – he said – for its being a reconstruction that was easy for me to make, having always had the aspiration to work as a psychopedagogist”.
The work aims above all to raise awareness of the current prison situation, focusing attention on the difficulty of recovery, not from a medical or psychological point of view, but due to the small number of professionals compared to the number of prisoners: an aspect that in fact prevents the planning of personalized pedagogical paths, not to mention the complex and long bureaucratic process to which recovery protocols are subjected.
“The current situation of prison re-education is a disaster,” concluded the director, “and this film aims to send a signal in some way.”
A great challenge also for Tony Sperandeo, who identified with the character by imagining his reactions. The desire to give a sign of hope and recovery in the scene in which Riina speaks with God: “I thought that a man with 19 life sentences on his back could and should confront God and answer for his misdeeds.”