CORLEONE: A HISTORY OF LA COSA NOSTRA

[The story of] Salvatore Riina, aka Totò Riina (1930–2017), whose prodigious rise and fall recounts a swathe of mafia history in a Sicily that saw this farmer’s son instinctively and brutally conquer immense power by spreading terror even within his own ranks. “Reading everything I could find on him, I was unable to shake off the image of a Richard III with only the hump missing. To reach the top of Cosa Nostra and stay there, he dared to attack state representatives head-on, and didn’t think twice about having his own hitmen executed whenever he felt they posed a threat to his interests.”…
“I leafed through the newspapers of the time at the Gramsci Institute, he reminisces. I was authorised to consult the forensic identification photographs that gave the measure of the ferocity of the crimes committed.”
[The film] finally gives voice to many repentant criminals, whose stories and thoughts anchor the film in a wonderfully enlightening human reality. “To meet them, he explains, you contact a service that knows their address, their new identity, and gives them an income. And in return for this, the courts can summon them at any time to obtain details on some point or other, or some dossier… If the criminal agreed to see me, I was given an appointment in a precise place, where the police would take me in hand and lead me to a flat where the criminal was waiting –that is, if he wasn’t in prison, in which case I’d film him in the visiting room.”
…“How come no one understood that Totò Riina was acting only in his own interest?” now wonders Giuseppe Marchese, who was one of his assassins and who, like so many others, obeyed him blindly.
François Ekchajzer (Télérama, 9 November 2018)