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 "La Trattativa" (The State-Mafia Pact), shown out of
competition at the world's oldest film festival, is directed by
Sabina Guzzanti, a former television satirist and a longstanding
foe of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who,
through film clips, figures prominently in her new film.
"In understanding and getting to the bottom of this material, I
too, had moments of depression, of fear and I thought the same
things all of us have for years, 'I'm leaving (Italy), there's
nothing left to do here'," Guzzanti told a news conference after
the screenings.
"But I believe the purpose of this film is to enable everyone,
including those who don't get into specifics and who don't read
the newspapers every morning, or ever, to understand what we are
facing and the facts that have changed the course of our
democracy."
While never definitively proven, speculation about possible
contacts between shadowy representatives of the Italian state
and the Sicilian mafia to end a string of bombings in the early
1990s has never gone away. Sicilian prosecutors are currently
working on a major trial over the case.
The so-called "Trattativa Stato Mafia" is believed to have
formed part of a wider set of relationships between Italian
politicians and the mafia reaching to the highest levels.
The film strongly suggests that Berlusconi's party, Forza
Italia, was created at least in part to provide the Mafia with a
friendlier government that would ease off on prosecutions and
restrictions on convicted organized crime figures that limited
their activities while imprisoned.
A year ago, a Palermo appeals court convicted Marcello Dell'Utri,
a longtime political ally and friend of Berlusconi, of acting as
a go-between for the Sicilian Mafia and the Milan business
elite, including Berlusconi's companies, until 1992 and
sentenced him to seven years in prison.
Dell'Utri ran the advertising company in Berlusconi's media
empire from 1984 to 1995, and became a key adviser when
Berlusconi entered politics two decades ago, helping him to
establish Forza Italia from scratch.
Berlusconi, who has always strongly denied mafia links, and
Dell'Utri have been dogged by legal troubles for most of their
political careers, and both accuse magistrates of persecuting
them for political reasons.
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Guzzanti's film uses the device of what it calls "show business"
people mounting a stage play that uses actors to play some of the
investigators, politicians and Mafia figures.
It intersperses their performances with film clips of the actual
bombings, and the political, judicial, police and crime figures of
the time.
The bombings, including one that used a car rigged with 1,000 kilos
of TNT, killed special prosecutors and investigative magistrates in
Italy in the early 1990s, most notably the anti-mafia magistrates
Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who were killed in Palermo in
1992.
The disappearance of Borsellino's red police diary, in which he
jotted investigative information so sensitive he would never let out
of his sight, has become one of the enduring mysteries of that
period and is one of the focal points of the film.
It suggests that it contained incriminating evidence of negotiations
between representatives of the government and the then-Mafia chief,
Salvatore "the Beast" Riina, brutal capo of the Corleonesi clan.
Guzzanti said she and the film's researchers had taken great pains
to ensure the facts reported were correct but she showed little
confidence that anyone would ever be held to account.
"Everything in the film has been verified and double checked and all
the facts are real and confirmed," she said, adding that her team
had "verified everything 1,400 times".
"This doesn't mean that if a fact is confirmed to have taken place,
that a guilty party will be found. In our country we've never found
the guilty ones for anything and probably won't find one in this
trial over the negotiations," she said.
(Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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