Diaz - Don't Clean Up This Blood
April. 13,2012On July 19–21, 2001, over 200,000 people took to the streets of Genoa to protest against the ongoing G8 summit. Anti-globalization activists clashed with the police, with 23-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani shot dead after confronting a police vehicle. In the aftermath, the police organized a night raid on the Diaz high school, where around a hundred people between unarmed protesters—mostly students—and independent reporters who documented the police brutality during the protests had took shelter. What happened next was called by Amnesty International "the most serious breach of civil liberties in a democratic Western country since World War II."
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Reviews
I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.
To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.
It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
When you ever wished you had participated in a happy leftie mass event - watch that movie. The camera gave me the whole time the feeling of being part of the crowd on the screen, just there in the school building, between all the funny people - the guy who plays flamenco guitar, some Manu Chao song, the pop-up band, people just dancing - all of them who want to make the world a better place. A lot of languages are used all over the movie, people act like like real people do, it's just fine. This is the first part. Everything afterward, as we know, is of extreme brutality, and I was happy that I had never been part in that leftie mass event. I really liked the movie how it was make, technically. It's only a pity that a lot of answers are not given. It would have been helpful to work out more of the backgrounds. The extreme force of the police, where did it come from? There must have been a lot of hate and fear a long time in advance. We don't get to know much about the really violent left wing and how far the police was able or willing to make a difference between them and the average wild-haired, guitar-playing and further peaceful demonstrators. So, I missed some different points of view besides just the picture of peaceful lefties. But when you realize that everything really has happened like this, the the world is maybe less subtle some times. And that makes me shiver.
In Late April 2009, I got a call in London to come to Genova to meet several mystery guests who wanted to meet me and several of the other Diaz victims. I was coming anyway to see Dr Zucca (The Genova prosecutor) but I was intrigued to find out who the mystery guests were. I met Domenico Procacci and Daniele Vicari in Genova at the Via San Luca office (where the Diaz case is archived) in late May for a 'secret weekend meeting' after the Cannes Film Festival.At the time, I did not know who Procacci and Vicari were but I was told they were the best film producer and director in Italy and they wanted to make a movie of the raid on Diaz during the G8. I had seen Gomorrah, Procacci's mafia film and thought it was brilliant. Using this film as a comparison, I listened to what Domenico wanted to say to all of us present. Procacci explained to us that he had wanted to make a multi-million euro film about the raid for a long time but had been prevented because the trial process against the police.He was willing to risk a lot of money on the project and we could all see that Domenico and Daniele were committed to making the movie. I personally told them that whilst I had a lot of personal confidence, I thought the Diaz police would try and stop the project or the right ring politicians like Berlusconi or Fini my sue Fandango. I also told them that Diaz is still live court case and that they had to do a lot of research.After all of us from Diaz consulted with each other, we gave Domenico Procacci and Daniele Vicari permission to make the film. All of us were taking a risk allowing a production company like fandango access to the video evidence & photos and documents involved in the trial. However, we all felt that the story of the raid and what we had lived through had to be told to the rest of the world.What is unusual about the Diaz movie was that there was no script in existence, so Fandango commissioned Laura Paolucci to spend two years writing a script. The end result is a pulp fiction style film which is 80% true to the story of Diaz. Obviously, Vicari could not go into detail about the entire G8 which forms the backdrop for the beginning of the film but I think Vicari has done an almost perfect job of marrying together true events with a few high drama fictional characters.I think the combination of powerful high impact footage, recreated scenes and the chance of lifting the lift on the inside of the anti-globalization movement makes Diaz the movie a special film. The 2001 G8 was the biggest and worst riot in Europe in 60 years. To complete the film, Vicari has combined the usual high quality style of Italian film screening to capture this important moment of history, making it one of the best, most talked about and most controversial films to come out of Italy in 20 years.Only after the film had premiered in Berlin did I learn that Procacci had said that Diaz had been his most challenging and complicated film to make with Vicari in agreement.My story is played by an Italian actor Pietro Ragusa and my almost death is one of the penultimate scenes in the movie. Because I ran out of Diaz, I took the full force of Canterini's unit, the 7th Mobile heavy riot unit that had specially trained for the Genova G8 summit. Pietro's part is almost as it exactly happened and I am very happy despite the scene is one of the most harrowing.
Sometimes you see a movie about something was really happened. And you were there, at that time. And you don't want to forget. You want nobody will forget. I think this movie is well done, maybe not a real artistic masterpiece, but I don't think this was the target for the director. The real target was just to document real fact as they happened. And if facts were not really that way the director and the producer would surely have problems with law. No problems happened. Sadly, I would prefer to know that this film was fictional and the policemen did their job in the right and humane way. I would really like "Diaz" was just a fiction. But it is not. By the way, I'm from Genova and I was there at the time. Not inside Diaz school, fortunately.
People need to understand that this is a *drama* not a documentary. Drama as in the dramatization. It was a terrible event in actuality, but this goes way overboard in depicting brutalization just for the shockfactor, of which there is plenty. It goes completely overboard. Actually, the filmmakers should be ashamed of themselves for exploiting what happened just to make a buck. It is very unfortunate that some ignorant people will assume that just because it is in a movie it is true. It is not. This film is a classic communist style "agitprop" film: agitation propaganda, made for the purpose of provoking the audience to action. Action in ignorance is as bad as no action. While people have a right to be outraged on the basis of an actual documentary or reading actual news accounts, this piece of fiction is not it.