Kim Longinotto

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. 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.”