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: Hunter Goddard

A jack of all trades, Master of Arts, 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 as well as flash essays where I leave the world a more beautiful place than I found it, with a talent for creative nonfiction where other artists wield a paintbrush or a musical instrument instead. Here, you will find the facts of life aestheticized into the plot points of your next favorite dramatic narrative. View all posts by Hunter Goddard