This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
I made this film in a town that legal professionals and journalists stigmatise as one of the most mafia-ridden places in Italy, one of the nerve centres of the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta: Africo. Africo, in the province of Reggio Calabria, on the Ionic coast: the sea is beautiful there, unknown to tourists, and behind it rise up some of the most beautiful, untamed mountains in Italy – the Aspromonte. In between, the landscape is marked by the anarchic building developments so indicative of the south of Italy, and of the mistreatment of Italy.
When I said I wanted to make the film there, everyone tried to discourage me: it’s too difficult, it’s inaccessible, it’s too dangerous.
It was an impossible film. I sought help from Gioacchino Criaco, author of “Anime Nere”, the book on which the film is loosely based. I arrived in Calabria full of prejudice and fear. I discovered a very complex and diverse reality. I saw mistrust turn into curiosity, and people opened their doors to us.
I mixed my actors with the residents of Africo, who acted and worked with the cast. Without them, this film would have been poorer. Africo has a very tough history of criminality but it can help us understand many things about our country. From Africo, we have a better view of Italy.