Directors Antonio Piazza Fabio Grassadonia pose with the cast and crew of the movie “Iddu” (Sicilian Letters), in competition, during arrivals for its screening at the 81st Venice Film Festival, Venice, Italy, September 5, 2024
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The mafia makes its presence felt at the Venice Film Festival this year, with a film inspired by boss Matteo Messina Denaro, who died last year after three decades on the lam.

That long period as a fugitive — aided by family, loyalists and likely even more powerful political forces — is “a black page in the history of Italy”, said Fabio Grassadonia, who along with director Antonio Piazza directed “Sicilian Letters”, which premiered Thursday at the festival.

The two Sicilian filmmakers told AFP they sought to understand how Messina Denaro was able to live and operate underground for so long before his arrest in January 2023 and death from cancer in September while in prison.

Those reasons “are not only due to the intelligence or skill of the fugitive, but have very deep roots in the system that revolves around him, in the system of little ones who help him, but also strong powers who supported him,” Mr. Grassadonia said.

Messina Denaro was one of the most ruthless bosses in Cosa Nostra, the real-life Sicilian crime syndicate depicted in the “Godfather” movies.

The 61-year-old was convicted of involvement in the murder of anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 and in deadly bombings in Rome, Florence and Milan in 1993, while one of his six life sentences was for the kidnapping and murder of the 12-year-old son of a witness in the Falcone case.

He disappeared in the summer of 1993 during a crackdown by the Italian state on the Sicilian mob, remaining on the top of Italy’s most-wanted list while steadily becoming a figure of legend.

It was his decision to seek treatment for colon cancer that led to his arrest on January 16, 2023, while visiting a clinic in Palermo.

Italy will not be able to turn a page on the Mafia until it comes clean with its past, the directors said.

“It is a country that has not yet told the truth about this criminal phenomenon,” Mr. Grassadonia said.

“And until the truth emerges, we continue to revolve around the same things, we continue to reiterate a past that does not end and which becomes the present…” he said.

But that search for truth is clouded by the Mafia’s huge financial clout today.

The “billions of euros that support the economy” make it “difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish where the clean economy begins and where the dirty one ends,” Mr. Grassadonia said.

‘Swamp’

In the film, the central character Matteo (played by Elio Germano) continues to manage the Mafia’s affairs from his apartment hideout.

He communicates with his family and henchmen through the so-called “pizzini” network — messages scrawled on pieces of paper to secure communications between him and his circle, to be burned after being read.

Reluctantly helping the police to capture Matteo is Catello, an intelligent ex-politician and headmaster with dubious morals played by Toni Servillo, the star of Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film “The Great Beauty.”

Mr. Grassadonia said that while Servillo’s character is “undoubtedly an amoral figure”, his is a “more ‘sunny’ morality than the dark and black one of Matteo.”

With the interplay of the two characters, the directors said they hoped to illuminate “a certain Italian socio-cultural fabric”.

The film is the third from the directors about the Mafia.

“We wanted to talk about this swamp in which we stagnate,” Mr. Piazza said.

“We must try to continue telling, because otherwise we encounter that phenomenon of repression,” which does not move the country forward, he said.

“We are confident because we think that, like us, there are still other people, even in other fields, who continually try to talk, to ask questions, to look for answers,” he said.

“There are still too many questions that had or didn’t have answers — or had answers that were a little too simple to be true.”