Feminist documentarian releases new anti-Mafia film

Kim Longinotto’s documentary, Shooting the Mafia (2019), biographizes Letizia Battaglia, a Palermo-born eighty-four-year-old woman who left behind her life as an unhappy housewife in her forties to photograph Mafia atrocities for L’Ora, according to the New Statesman. Battaglia was the first female photographer to work at a daily Italian newspaper, and she would go on to take six hundred thousand pictures of the Costa Nostra as well as the devastation they wrought on Sicilian communities, where eighty percent of businesses still pay protection money. The filmmaker, whose other feminist documentaries include Divorce Iranian Style (1998) and The Day I Will Never Forget (2002), hopes her latest release will counterbalance Hollywood’s popular Mafia narrative, which still inspires young Sicilian men to join the Cosa Nostra.

Author: Jack Trades, Master of Arts

Jack of all trades, MA, in multimedia content creation and marketing. I'm developing my blog site, Suspension of Disbelief, into a collection of daily short-form news posts about the industry and craft of writing to draw literary artists in with my words, then commune with them through flash essays about insights and observations I make as though the personal blog were a writing journal. Please check out the links to my social channels for deep readings into each genre (fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry), while I showcase the critical skillset I cultivated from studying journalism and film theory at Colorado State University Fort Collins, in addition to professional creative nonfiction at the University of Denver. View all posts by Jack Trades, Master of Arts