Film
Reclaim the Frame: Shooting the Mafia (15)
Dir. Kim Longinotto, Ireland, 2019, 94 mins.
There was little to hint at Letizia Battaglia’s skill as a crime-scene photographer. In her 40s, stuck in a stuffy bourgeois household and battling with depression, she took a job as a photographer for a Palermo-based newspaper. Planning to document ordinary people’s lives, she soon found herself recording the reign of terror inflicted on the city’s inhabitants by the Mafia. Those photographs are, by turns, visually dazzling and shocking. Narrated by Battaglia, who is now in her 80s, Shooting the Mafia is a poignant and inspiring account of a free-spirited woman profoundly attached to her city and ready to fight for it regardless of the danger to her own life.
After the film, we will be hosting a discussion between hosted by Mia Bays, Director-At-Large of Birds' Eye View and Oscar-winning producer, and Heidi Morstang, Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Plymouth.
Heidi Morstang works with photography and experimental documentary films. Her work explores the significance of landscape; she is interested in the social, cultural, environmental and archaeological histories embedded in landscapes. She has exhibited her photographic work and screened her films internationally since 1995.
Reclaim The Frame is a mission to bring ever-greater audiences to films by women to widen and enrich cinema’s perspective of the world, run by charity Birds’ Eye View, and backed by the British Film Institute’s Audience Fund. To join the #ReclaimTheFrame mission and receive free cinema tickets, discount codes and other film goodies, click here.
There was little to hint at Letizia Battaglia’s skill as a crime-scene photographer. In her 40s, stuck in a stuffy bourgeois household and battling with depression, she took a job as a photographer for a Palermo-based newspaper. Planning to document ordinary people’s lives, she soon found herself recording the reign of terror inflicted on the city’s inhabitants by the Mafia. Those photographs are, by turns, visually dazzling and shocking. Narrated by Battaglia, who is now in her 80s, Shooting the Mafia is a poignant and inspiring account of a free-spirited woman profoundly attached to her city and ready to fight for it regardless of the danger to her own life.
After the film, we will be hosting a discussion between hosted by Mia Bays, Director-At-Large of Birds' Eye View and Oscar-winning producer, and Heidi Morstang, Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Plymouth.
Heidi Morstang works with photography and experimental documentary films. Her work explores the significance of landscape; she is interested in the social, cultural, environmental and archaeological histories embedded in landscapes. She has exhibited her photographic work and screened her films internationally since 1995.
Reclaim The Frame is a mission to bring ever-greater audiences to films by women to widen and enrich cinema’s perspective of the world, run by charity Birds’ Eye View, and backed by the British Film Institute’s Audience Fund. To join the #ReclaimTheFrame mission and receive free cinema tickets, discount codes and other film goodies, click here.