Veteran documentarian Kim Longinotto’s Shooting The Mafia is a portrait of fearless photojournalist Letizia Battaglia, who spent her career documenting the life and crimes of the Sicilian Mafia. Featured at the 2019 Sundance and Berlin film festivals and soon to be seen at DOC NYC, Shooting The Mafia will open at the Quad Cinema on Friday, November 22 with a national rollout to follow.
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, 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 84-year-old’s own memories, Shooting The Mafia paints a portrait of a remarkable woman whose whose bravery and defiance helped expose the Mafia’s brutal crimes.
Director 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 ofan 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.