Kim Longinot­to: ​‘I feel I’ve been cheat­ed all my life by Hollywood’

Kim Longinot­to excels at pro­vid­ing obser­va­tion­al por­traits of extra­or­di­nary women forg­ing their way in oppres­sive struc­tures across the world. Her usu­al method is to embed her­self with­in events as they hap­pen, nev­er flinch­ing from point­ing her cam­era at moments of over­whelm­ing emo­tion. Shoot­ing the Mafia is a depar­ture in that it is a film borne of archival footage and she has a sur­ro­gate in the form of Paler­mo-based octo­ge­nar­i­an Letizia Bag­glia, who lived many lives before launch­ing her career as a pho­to­jour­nal­ist in the 1970s for Sicil­ian paper, L’Ora.

The Sicil­ian Mafia was at the peak of its pow­ers and their killings dom­i­nat­ed Letizia’s assign­ments. She took pho­tos of bod­ies in the street, of moth­ers hold­ing pho­tos of miss­ing chil­dren, of bombed out cars, risk­ing her life by chron­i­cling the litany of vio­lent acts about which a whole region had been ter­rorised into keep­ing omertà̀. As Longinot­to puts it, ​“I feel I’ve been cheat­ed all my life by Hol­ly­wood. You see Al Paci­no shoot­ing some­body and it’s just fun. You don’t see that that per­son has a fam­i­ly, or the peo­ple who have to scrape the bod­ies off the ground and put them in a cof­fin. You don’t see that chil­dren are murdered.”

Pro­duc­er Niamh Fagan Holmes dis­cov­ered Bagglia’s work in 2013. While trav­el­ling through Sici­ly, she vis­it­ed the anti-Mafia muse­um in the small town of Cor­leone. ​“When you go in, the walls are adorned by black-and-white pho­tographs of var­i­ous sizes, some poster size. They’re real­ly effec­tive pho­tographs, dev­as­tat­ing but beau­ti­ful at the same time.” Holmes did her research and, after dis­cov­er­ing that nobody had made a film about Battaglia, reached out to Longinot­to to rem­e­dy that.

Shoot­ing the Mafia inter­twines a range of mate­ri­als: obser­va­tion­al footage of Letizia shot by Longinot­to; Letizia’s pho­tographs; archive news­reel footage; and excerpts from films of that era. Ollie Hud­dle­ston has been Longinotto’s edi­tor for 20 years. He talked about work­ing from cards stuck on a wall to cre­ate a lay­ered sto­ry. ​“There’s many themes and the more you can put into it, the more we’re going to care, so we blend those. Not hav­ing footage of Letizia falling in love, we had to use a movie. Not hav­ing footage of the Mafia mur­ders oth­er than just bod­ies in the street, we use the tuna being bat­tered by fish­er­men. You have to use metaphor. We lay­ered it up as much as we could. You’re hav­ing to mar­ry the two sto­ries the whole time – the per­son­al and the larg­er sto­ry. The thing that drove us was that it should be an emo­tion­al experience.”

One per­vad­ing emo­tion is sor­row for the count­less vic­tims who met their end like ani­mals in the street. Letizia’s pho­tos are full of the inti­ma­cy of bear­ing wit­ness to real death. Longinot­to recalls some­thing she says with­in the film, ​“When you’re tak­ing these pho­tographs of peo­ple in extreme dis­tress, you want to tell them you love them, and this pho­to is going to bear wit­ness to what these cow­ards are doing… But you can’t.”

Among its oth­er qual­i­ties, Shoot­ing the Mafia is an extra­or­di­nary research project, with Letizia’s pho­tos often seen in con­text with archive footage from crime scenes and court room audio, the lat­ter kick­ing in once the film’s chronol­o­gy reach­es Gio­van­ni Fal­cone and Pao­lo Borselli­no, the judges who fought the mafia and their giant crim­i­nal tri­al that indict­ed 475 mafiosi run­ning from 1986 – 1992.

Holmes says of the process, ​“The Ital­ian news sta­tion RAI have amaz­ing archives. They keep every­thing but they just don’t know where it is. It takes a long time and a lot of per­sis­tence to say, ​‘I know you have it.’ You need to have maybe seen some­thing in anoth­er film, or anoth­er doc­u­men­tary that’ll lead you to that. It’s peel­ing back the lay­ers. We have an amaz­ing woman at RAI called Sila Berru­ti. She worked day and night for us.” Holmes adds that the pro­duc­tion was buoyed by mass local sup­port. ​“Peo­ple would hear what you were talk­ing about and say, ​‘Have you seen this film?’ Peo­ple were real­ly eager to help, par­tic­u­lar­ly Sicilians.”

Asked whether there was any­thing too bru­tal to include in the film. Longinot­to replies in a heart­beat, ​“There was a sto­ry that we cut out and I’m glad we did – it was just too much. It’s an Ital­ian sto­ry about Giuseppe Di Mat­teo, a 12-year-old boy who was the son of an informer. We got the real voiceover of the peo­ple who kid­napped him. He went with them will­ing­ly because they were friends of his father. They kept him in a hole in the ground for two years but he still went on trust­ing them. Then they said, ​‘Oh come on we’re gonna take you back to your dad’ and then they stran­gled him. I had night­mares about it.”

We were spared this sto­ry, but it remained the production’s mis­sion to show that the Mafia mur­der chil­dren ​“because that is nev­er in films,” says Longinot­to. ​“I’ve nev­er seen a Mafia film – The God­fa­ther or Good­fel­las or any gang­ster film – where they come up behind an unarmed kid and just shoot him down.” Letizia took a colour pho­to of a child lying on the pave­ment face­down in a pool of his blood. He had wit­nessed his father’s mur­der and prob­a­bly knew the killers. This image appears late in the film. ​“We thought it was impor­tant to have that shot because they can’t go any low­er than that. I don’t think we ever doubt­ed putting that in. It was one of the last pho­tos that Letizia took and you can sort of see why.”

Longinot­to reflects on the toll of being mar­i­nat­ed in such bloody images. ​“Noth­ing com­pared to what Letizia went through. We did all get real­ly freaked out that year and a half, but she was doing it for 20 years. It is real­ly dif­fer­ent. We were look­ing at pho­tographs, we weren’t tak­ing them.” On a lighter note, is Letizia still with the artist 38 years her junior that we see her with in the film? Longinot­to shrieked with delight: ​“Yes!!”

Shoot­ing the Mafia is released 29 Novem­ber. Read the LWLies review.