Who was Rizzotto Placido da Corleone? I have asked myself this question many times. Many times I have tried to imagine him, imagine his face, his walk, his tone of voice.

Too few are the 2 photos that give us his portraIt. In those days the poor had their photos taken for their wedding only. Placido never made it to marriage. So I prefer to think of him as a name.

Who knows what he was thinking of on that warm March night, when in the company of his assassins, Placido Rizzzotto went along the dark streets of a Corleone suspended in time? Who knows if he was still alive when they through him into that "chasm" deep into the bowels of the earth? Who knows if he shook, if he defended himself, if he asked for help?

What is the use of a film on Placido Rizzotto? And why tell again (and to whom) the story of his life and of his death?

I think that , far from any form of rhetoric, the sublime poetic sense that emanates from each and every manifestation of courage, each pure sentiment of human dignity, each defence of the weak , each event that is really democratic, deserves to be narrated, needs to be narrated and conveyed to other generations so that through the passing of generations people don’t lose their dreams. That dream, broken that night of the 10th of March in 1948, when the secretary of the Trades Union office of Corleone, Placido Rizzotto disappeared into the void. For a strange coincidence of fate, a series of young men that would become important, in one way or another, in the contemporary history of Italy, converged together around his disappearance. The then captain of the carabinieri, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, who carried out the investigation and arrested the assassins of Rizzotto; the young university student, Pio La Torre, who substituted Rizzotto as the head of the peasants. And, from the other side, there was Luciano Liggio, (Rizzotto’s assassin), and the members of his gang who, thereafter, would become the bosses of the Mafia.

Pasquale Scimeca (Director of "Placido Rizzotto")

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