/ Director
Ricky Tognazzi
/ Cast
Claudio Amendola, Tony Sperandeo, Ricky Memphis, Enrico Lo Verso, Carlo Cecchi, Leo Gullotta, Angelo Infanti, Ugo Conti
/ Music
Ennio Morricone
/ Producer
Claudio Bonivento
/ Screenplay
Graziano Diana and Simona Izzo
/ Length
95 min.
/ Year
1993
/ Sponsor
San Diego Italian Film Festival
Date :: Thursday, February 18, 2010
Time :: 7:00 pm
Location :: MoPA in Balboa Park
Cost :: $5 donnation suggested
Language :: Italian with English subtitles
La Scorta
The Bodyguards
The early 1990s in Italy were marred by the unveiling of the corruption that ran deep through the country’s political elite. Already there had been suggestions of these ties made by General Della Chiesa in 1982, when he wrote the then President Spadolini suggesting that “the Sicilian branch of the Christian Democrats that answers directly to Andreotti is the political family that is most tarnished by mafia contaminations". Eventually, these suggestions were shown to be true with Tangentopoli (Bribesville) and Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) scandals and trials of the early 90s. These events all but decimated the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and Christian Democrats (DC) parties and led to an almost complete reorganization of the Italian political landscape.
The judge Antonio Di Pietro led the charge in the investigations and sentencing in the above named actions. Along with Di Pietro other judges from the so-called Milan team worked to unearth the illicit activities, corruption and organized crime connections that had since the end of WWII held the country in its grip. Many politicians were indicted under charges that suggested collusion with organized crime. As more and more politicians fell by the wayside, the feeling that a new day in the struggle with crime had began gave rise to many Anti-Mafia cultural and political organizations. At the state level, a concerted effort was made to assign magistrates to deal specifically with the Mafia.
Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were two such magistrates who sought to bring to justice Mafiosi and move toward restoring a sense of respectability to the country. The film La Scorta was made in the aftermath of the May and July 1992 assassinations of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, ten years after Della Chiesa, who had himself been sent to Sicily to deal with the Mafia, had been assassinated.
While Italians could not but identify Falcone, Borsellino and others in the magistrate portrayed in the film, La Scorta is a film that casts its lens toward a reality that is often forgotten and certainly undervalued for the service it renders the country, the magistrate’s bodyguards. The film’s main focus is on the lives of the policemen who accompany and protect him. This is a protest film that is unpretentious yet forceful and which, without raising its voice, effectively gives a face to the dedication of usually invisible and unheralded individuals.
The recent publication of Roberto Saviano’s book Gomorra (2006), and Matteo Garrone’s 2008 film version by the same name, represent a milepost of sorts in the long struggle against organized crime in Italy. Criminal organizations such as the Camorra, the ‘ndrangheta and the Mafia have long been a blight on Italian society. The mistaken notion that their violence was internal to their organizations and that “good people” who were not involved were most likely never to have to come face to face with that reality has repeatedly been broken by highly visible and impactful incidents. Saviano based his book on actual Judicial records not merely to reveal single crimes and their perpetrators but to point out the insidious nature of criminal organizations and a whole series of connections by which the Camorra, like the Mafia and ‘ndrangheta, has infiltrated every aspect of private and public life.
The films in this “Anti-Mafia Mini-series” presented by the San Diego Italian Film Festival testify to the long-standing struggle against organized crime. La Scorta (1993), I Cento Passi (2000) and Alla Luce del Sole (2005) form part of a subgenre of Italian cinema that has come to be labeled "political film". The Neapolitan film-maker Francesco Rosi is acknowledged as one of the fathers of the genre, having made among others Hands Over the City (1963), The Mattei Affair (1972) and Salvatore Giuliano (1974) all of which in some way explored the extent of corruption in the Italian political milieu and its collusion with organized criminality. More recent films, such as the ones in our series, and Alessandro Di Robilant’s Il giudice ragazzino (1994), Pasquale Scimeca’s Placido Rizzotto (2000) and Marco Amenta’s La siciliana ribelle (2009) have also joined the ranks of the political film genre with what can more accurately be termed anti-mafia films.
One particularly important trait of these films is that they make known the names and stories of ordinary, every-day people in their struggle against organized crime.
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