Filmes
Jornal da Mostra
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31ª Mostra > 21/02/2008
Text: Leon Cakoff, from Berlin, to ‘Jornal da Mostra’
ROSI THINKS THE MAFIA REMAINS IN ITALY
Filmmaker Francesco Rosi, who was honored at the 58th Berlin Festival, with the Golden Bear for his career, took profit of the lights of the event to throw more fuel in his statements about the Italian political situation, especially in the south of the country, and his messy Neapolitan region. Rosi’s career is irregular, but he made some of the great films that confronted and denounced the crimes of the Italian mafia.
In 2006 the Cosac Naify publishing house, in a partnership with the São Paulo International Film Festival, published the book ITALIAN POLITICAL CINEMA IN THE 60’S AND 70’S, where Rosi states that what prevails in his films is, above all, the contents. And he quotes LE MANI SULLA CITTÀ, which he shot in 1963, to remind us that his Naples is still living under the recurrent tragedy of lack of work, education, civility, legality, social stability, of such degradation and such corruption in which organized crime established itself with fierce violence.
Francesco Rosi is one of the main activists to denounce the political crises installed in Italy by the so-called “eco-mafia”, with the accumulation of tons of garbage on the streets of Naples, and with no solution to that. It is spoken about conflicts of interests of mafia branches to incite the people to block the garbage transfer to improvised sites without the sanitary adequacy, in a region which is famous for its tourist attractions – the Vesuvius and Pompey. European Community Authorities also accuse the Italian government of not collaborating strongly to solve the problem. As the filmmaker suggested in his 1963 classic, the mafia still has its tentacles over the city.
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English version: Laura Rebessi