Grand Jury Prize Nominee - Sundance Film Festival 2019
Panorama Audience Award Nominee - Berlin International Film Festival 2019
Official Selection - BFI Lodon Film Festival 2019
Official Selection - Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival 2019
Official Selection - SFFILM Doc Stories 2019
Opens November 29
Landmark's Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco
Screeners are available upon request
Please email Publicity@Larsenassc.com to request an interview and/or a screener
SHOOTING THE MAFIA is a documentary about Italian photographer Letizia Battaglia, who spends her career documenting the life and crimes of the Mafia. SHOOTING THE MAFIA is a Cohen Media Group release, runs 97 minutes, in English and Italian with English subtitles, and is not rated by MPAA yet.
About the film Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia began a lifelong battle with the Mafia when she first dared to point her camera at a brutally slain victim. A woman whose passions led her to abandon traditional family life and become a photojournalist in the 1970s—the first female photographer to be employed by an Italian daily newspaper—Battaglia found herself on the front lines during one of the bloodiest chapters in Italy’s recent history. She fearlessly and artfully captured everyday Sicilian life—from weddings and funerals to the grisly murders of ordinary citizens—to tell the narrative of how the community she loved in her native Palermo was forced into silence by the Cosa Nostra. Weaving together Battaglia’s striking black-and-white photographs, rare archival footage, classic Italian films, and the now 84-year-old’s own memories, Shooting the Mafia paints a portrait of a remarkable woman whose bravery and defiance helped expose the Mafia’s brutal crimes.
About the director Kim Longinotto
Kim Longinotto is a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker, well known for making films about female outsiders and rebels. Among her 20 films, she has followed a teenager struggling to become a wrestling star in Gaea Girls (2000), looked at runaway girls in Iran in Runaway (2001), challenged the tradition of female genital mutilation in Kenya in The Day I Will Never Forget (2002), introduced Cameroon female judges in Sisters in Law (2005) and brave South African child advocates in Rough Aunties (2008), shown women standing up to rapists in India in Pink Saris (2010), and told the story of an Indian Muslim woman who smuggled poetry out to the world while locked up by her family in Salma (2013). Longinotto’s most recent film, Dreamcatcher (2015), looks at the life and work of an ex-prostitute who rescues Chicago girls from the street.
