Cinema in mafia boss’s Sicilian hometown refuses to screen film about his life

27 September 2024 , 17:42

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Matteo Messina Denaro was one of Italy’s most-wanted men until his capture in a Palermo clinic in January 2023. Photograph: Carabinieri handout/EPA

Venue owner says Sicilian Letters, about the Cosa Nostra leader Matteo Messina Denaro, ‘doesn’t interest me’

The owner of the only cinema in Castelvetrano, the Sicilian hometown of the notorious Cosa Nostra mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, has refused to screen a film based on his life.

Denaro died of cancer in September last year, nine months after he was arrested following 30 years on the run. 

The heavily fictionalised film, Sicilian Letters, premiered at the Venice film festival and will be released in Italian cinemas on 10 October.

Salvatore Vaccarino, the owner of Marconi cinema in Castelvetrano, refused to host a preview and to screen the film, the Giornale di Sicilia reported. “It doesn’t interest me, it doesn’t concern me,” Vaccarino told the newspaper.

He is the son of the late former mayor Antonio Vaccarino, who was convicted of drugs trafficking in the 1990s and is known for having corresponded with Denaro on behalf of Italy’s secret services as they sought to capture him. Sicilian Letters is based on the correspondence.

The Ansa news agency cited sources as saying one reason for Vaccarino not showing the film could be because of the reference to his father. Others said sympathies for Denaro ran deep in Castelvetrano and the film depicted him in a negative light.

Giovanni Lentini, Castelvetrano’s mayor, said he would try to persuade Vaccarino to show the film “so that citizens can be given the chance to see it”.

Denaro was one of Italy’s most-wanted men until his capture in a Palermo clinic, where he was receiving cancer treatment, in January 2023. He was given a life sentence in 2002 for crimes including involvement in the 1992 murders of the anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. He once bragged that he could “fill a cemetery” with his victims.

While on the run, Denaro maintained his luxurious lifestyle thanks to several bankrollers who, according to prosecutors, included politicians and businessmen. He lived in a modest apartment in Campobello di Mazara in the Sicilian province of Trapani in the months before his arrest.

Elio Germano plays the mobster in the film, which also features Toni Servillo, who played the protagonist in Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning movie The Great Beauty.

Emma Davis