Battaglia’s would not.Īrchival footage had to be a necessary part of this project, which had been brought to Longinotto by Irish producer Niamh Fagan. And all these stories unfolded in real time before her eyes. Past subjects include a teen struggling to become a wrestling star ( Gaea Girls), runaway girls in Iran ( Runaway), female judges in Cameroon ( Sisters in Law), Indian women standing up to rapists ( Pink Saris), and an ex-prostitute rescuing girls from the Chicago streets ( Dreamcatcher).īut all these films were vérité, with Longinotto operating camera in an intimate pas de deux with her subjects. Except for that troubling gap.īattaglia fit right in with the British director’s predilection for female rebels and outsiders. Adored at home, but unknown abroad, Battaglia’s story was ripe for the picking. That was veteran filmmaker Kim Longinotto’s conundrum when faced with Letizia Battaglia, photographer for the Palermo newspaper L’Ora in the 1970s and ’80s, during the Mafia’s heyday. What do you do? How do you relate 60 years of adult life without it? Maybe 90 minutes of home movies that are mostly unusable. But you have a problem: There’s virtually no photographic record of her. You’ve got her images to work with, as powerful as anything by Weegee. In Palermo, Italy, no less, at a time when women stayed home, Mafia mayhem went unchecked, and a photojournalist’s job was to document the corpses piling up in the streets.

Not just any career: Newspaper photographer, a man’s job. You want to tell her life story-how she left her stifling marriage at age 40 and defiantly set out on a career. Imagine this: You’ve got a great subject who’s now in her 80s.

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