Daniele Vicari

Rai Fiction presents a Rai Fiction – Italian International Film co-production

Produced by Fulvio and Paola Lucisano

Starring Fabrizio Gifuni with Dario Aita and Lorenza Indovina

A TV-movie written by Claudio Fava, Michele Gambino, Monica Zapelli, and Daniele Vicari

Based on the original book by Claudio Fava and Michele Gambino (Baldini & Castoldi)

Directed by Daniele Vicari

AWARD NASTRO D’ARGENTO 2018 PER LA LEGALITA’ (SILVER RIBBON FOR LEGALITY)

Crew

Production Rai Fiction - Italian International Film Director Daniele Vicari Story Claudio Fava, Michele Gambino, Monica Zapelli Screenplay Claudio Fava, Michele Gambino, Monica Zapelli, Daniele Vicari Producers Fulvio Lucisano, Paola Lucisano Executive Producer Giulio Steve Artistic Producer Guia Loffredo Rai Producers Alessandra Ottaviani, Paola Pannicelli Cinematography Gherardo Gossi Assistant Director Alessandro Stellari Casting Adriana Sabbatini Editing Benni Atria Set Design Beatrice Scarpato Sound Alessandro Palmerini (A.I.T.S.) Line Producer Jacopo Cino Costumes Francesca Vecchi, Roberta Vecchi, with Rossella Aprea Makeup Marco Altieri Hair Massimo Allinoro Original Music Theo Teardo Edizioni musicali Rai Com – Italian International Film

Cast

Pippo Fava Fabrizio Gifuni Claudio Fava Dario Aita Lina (wife of Pippo Fava) Lorenza Indovina Sir Graci David Coco

Gaetano Fabrizio Ferracane Elena Fava Barbara Giordano Miki Carlo Calderone Riccardo Federico Brugnone Antonio Simone Corbisiero Giusi Selene Caramazza Rosario Beniamino Marcone Saro Davide Giordano Elena Brancati Roberta Rigano Cettina Manuela Ventura Lo Certo Gaetano Aronica Mother of Pippo Fava Aurora Quattrocchi

Before Night, a TV-movie directed by Daniele Vicari, went on-air for the first time on Rai Uno channel Wednesday May 23, 2018 as part of the Italian National Law Day, after premiering at the prestigious Teatro Petruzzelli as part of the BIF&ST Bari Film Festival. Before Night got 3,435,000 viewers and 15.7% share, making it the most viewed program of the first evening.

In 2018 "Before night" won the prestigious Nastro d’Argento per la Legalità (Silver Ribbon for Legality), for the high civil and political value of the story.

Before Night is a Rai Fiction – IIF coproduction, and was produced by Fulvio and Paola Lucisano.

Written by Claudio Fava, Michele Gambino, Monica Zapelli, and Daniele Vicari, Before Night is taken from the book of the same name by Claudio Fava and Michele Gambino (Baldini & Castoldi).

Acting alongside Fabrizio Gifuni and Dario Aita, who plays Pippo’s son, Claudio, are Lorenza Indovina, David Coco, Fabrizio Ferracane, Barbara Giordano, Carlo Calderone, Federico Brugnone, Simone Corbisiero, Selene Caramazza, Beniamino Marcone, Davide Giordano, Roberta Rigano, Manuela Ventura, Gaetano Aronica, and Aurora Quattrocchi.

The story of Pippo Fava (played by Fabrizio Gifuni) as told by the director Daniele Vicari is in the great Italian cinematic tradition of protest films broadcast on Rai’s Channel 1. It is a tribute to a charismatic and complex character who always went against the grain and never compromised, who always sought to publicise the truth, and who suffered the ultimate consequences for doing so. It is the amazing story of a man who was able to build the future, against all odds.

Synopsis

After turning fifty, and after a successful career in film, TV, radio and theatre, Pippo Fava decided in 1980 to return to his native Catania to found a newspaper. He also established a school of journalism that focused on asserting the freedom of opinion at all costs. This quickly led to clashes with the local business world and the mafia underlying it, which forced him to shut down the newspaper. To assert the need for independence and impartiality in the profession, together with the help of his son Claudio and the young people whom he had trained to become skilled, dedicated journalists, Pippo continued his journey by publishing a highly successful monthly magazine. The protests against the infiltration of his native city by the mafia, then led by Nitto Santapaola, did not go unnoticed. In fact, Santapaola himself ordered Fava’s assassination. After his death, his young pupils nevertheless continued to search for the truth and work for the freedom of the press.

The Story

When he received that phone call from Catania, Pippo Fava was at the age at which most people begin to take stock of their lives. Life had been good to Fava: a happy family, a profession at which he excelled and still liked, but above all a talent for writing fiercely and honestly, which had brought him considerable success in the form of novels, theatre plays, and a long career in journalism. And when his city started feeling too small, he decided to move to Rome, where more plays, films, and a new partner awaited him. No regrets for Catania. If not for that call, and the offer it contained: directing a newspaper. A daily newspaper. In his native city. “They’re giving you carte blanche…” explained an old colleague who admired and even envied him, like most of his friends whom he had left behind in Catania. “So, Pippo, what are you going to do? Are you going to say yes”? Fava said yes. He returned to Catania with the refound enthusiasm of his youth, when he thought that this would always be his city. But Catania had changed. It had crumbled from the inside. It had been transformed by too many corrupt deals and too many wars. Fava set an ambitious objective for the newspaper he edited: to be on par with the other Sicilian newspapers. He put together a team of young kids who were all barely more than teenagers, university students with fire in their bellies who were waiting for the opportunity to become journalists. They were as idealistic and relentless as their editor, and like him, convinced that that they were unstoppable. Even in Catania. Even on the brink of a mafia war that would eventually leave the city’s streets strewn with dozens of corpses. And with this fledgling staff of journalists, the newspaper headed by Fava began to talk about that system openly, to name those who could not be named, to reconstruct the facts. They didn’t see this as merely a challenge. For these young Sicilians, or carusi, and their editor, this was the only way they knew how to do their job. The first name they printed on the front page was Nitto Santapaola’s. Santapaola was a well-respected man in Catania, the guest of honour at all the important parties, listened to, protected, and admired by all the city’s notables: prominent businessmen, police prefects, constables, and councillors. But in Palermo, Santapaola was just a mafia boss, one of the most ruthless, the protagonist - Kalashnikov in hand – of one of the bloodiest settling of accounts in the history of Cosa Nostra in Sicily. And then, because of Pippo Fava, the invisible border line separating the two Sicilies risked disappearing forever. Fava pushed ahead, and so did the newspaper. His reporting included more and more details, names, and facts. Then, one day, the editors threw up their hands, and in the middle of the night, they went to the publisher’s office. The typesetters were told to stop working, and the next day, Fava was fired. But he didn’t give up. Together with his band of youngsters, who had formed a cooperative, he founded the monthly magazine I Siciliani: one hundred and sixty pages, coated paper, with a glossy, elegant, black cover. Below the masthead, a photograph of four men in grey pinstripe suits raising a toast: Catania’s most prominent businessmen, who until the day before had remained omnipotent and generally invisible. The lengthy article that opened that first issue of Pippo Fava’s magazine was dedicated to them: to their forays, political protection, dangerous relationships, and their cosy friendships with Santapaola, the mafioso. Everything. This time, things couldn’t be solved with a call to the publisher; there weren’t any publishers this time. I Siciliani flew off the shelves. The first edition sold out in two hours. Four more reprints, all sold out as well. Maybe those pages didn’t have many friends, but they did have lots of readers, who were even more loyal. The newspaper grew, becoming bolder and bolder each month. It aired plenty of dirty laundry, but it also described a generous and rebellious Sicily, a place of possibilities.

For Fava’s carusi, I Siciliani was a baptism. For Pippo Fava, it was an inevitable dance with death. Which took the form of the unflinching eye of a young assassin the age of his son Claudio, with a 7.65 Browning in his hand. Five shots to the back of the head on the evening of January 5, 1984. This was how Pippo Fava died.

Director’s notes

Freedom of press has again become an urgent issue at the heart of our political debate, and with it, the need for journalists to free themselves from increasingly powerful and pervasive conditioning. Which is why Pippo Fava’s story, personally and professionally, is so exemplary and moving to me. Freedom of press and of opinion was a true mission for Pippo Fava. He believed that journalists should be free of political and economic conditioning and not be beholden to anyone in power. To achieve this goal, Fava founded an extraordinary newspaper, I Siciliani, which remains a shining light in the history of Italian journalism, both for its content and its layout. He taught his students (the carusi) the value of rigorous investigation, of working on the quality of one’s writing, and exercising one’s critical skills at all times. At a time when journalism is under enormous pressure, also because of the astronomical growth of social media, which threatens to wrest authority over the “news” from journalism, the story of Fava and his band of youngsters offers us a path that is viable still today and tomorrow as well, one that believes in the inalienable principle of freedom of the press and of opinion. We need these things now more than ever. When given the remarkable opportunity to describe Pippo Fava’s personal and professional trajectory, I had to confront my reluctance to make ‘Mafia’ films, something that I had perhaps been put off for too long. Luckily, Fava was a vital, ironic, witty man, and this was a lifeline for me. His irony, even about the mafia, is exemplary. In a memorable interview with Enzo Biagi, Fava said about the Greco brothers, who stood accused of the murder of Judge Chinnici, that “they were just a bunch of delinquents.” Above all, his analytical clarity in his editorials was exemplary: “Those who do not rebel against human pain are not innocent”. I would say that this sentence alone, with its utopian underpinnings, can help us stem the debilitating cynicism that is crippling cinema, journalism, social media, and even literature. And this was how I decided to approach telling his story.

Mafia stories are almost always epics of ruin and decadence that culminate in violent death and extreme sacrifice. Fathers against sons, brothers against brothers, clan membership against love and friendship, stories of kingdoms and rulers, or saints and martyrs when it comes to the victims. The key to escaping these tropes that are so deeply ingrained in our narrative and cultural traditions lay in the generosity and intelligence expressed by Claudio Fava and Michele Gambino, who experienced the story first-hand, and by Monica Zapelli, the film’s screenwriter. The trust placed in me by IIF and Rai Fiction was also fundamental, since they immediately agreed on the idea of extracting what seemed to me to be the significant core of the story, which of course has to do with the Mafia, but which is not determined solely by its violent and “definitive” actions: the history of affection and education that bound and still binds Pippo Fava to his carusi, his young rebels. So the movie is not the tragic history of a man killed by the Mafia, rather the extraordinary history of a man who was able to build the future despite everything.

We conducted long rehearsals with the actors to understand the protagonists’ deepest motivations and reveal the characters. This gave a solid foundation to the entire emotional journey of the film. Together with Fabrizio Gifuni, we dug deep into Pippo’s personal and intellectual life to reveal those details that made the character “jump off” the page and become a three-dimensional, living character. Fortunately, Fabrizio is an ironic and self-ironic man, a bit like Fava, and he is a passionate seeker of detail, almost to the point of obsessiveness. He made this sense of determination and skill available to the carusi, which helped the other characters to grow, starting with the rich and difficult relationship with his son Claudio, which Dario Aita approached from the get-go with great sensitivity both as an actor and a person, and also to the other young actors and actresses who were all willing to put everything on the line. Good actors are a blessing to films and directors, and this film is no exception. Which is why, given the time and the means available, I wanted to create a space as open as possible to allow the actors to express themselves. The form that the film has taken – also due to the constant and meticulous work of my crew – is entirely the result of this approach. 9

At fifty-some years of age, Fava returned to his native Catania and founded one of Italy’s leading contemporary journalism schools. He gave dozens of young people the opportunity to learn one of the most beautiful professions in the world, one without which the word freedom simply doesn’t exist. This story is not about “good” versus “evil”. That is a false dichotomy that limits an understanding of the Mafia to the surface. It is merely about the sense of reason and passion of human beings against the savagery of power. The sense of reason of an all too human individual, full, of contradictions, flaws, and weaknesses, but also of talents and emotional daring, a man who left a very deep mark on our collective consciousness, and who ultimately towers far above the baseness of those who killed him and who had him killed. This links Fava’s murder with that of other prominent journalists and artists who were killed like dogs, first and foremost Pasolini, who also stood firmly against all power, and who in Catania, a few years before his death, was humiliated by people throwing fennel bulbs in those same neighborhoods that would denounce, and which still denounce Pippo Fava, because denigrating and delegitimising the dead is part of the long-term strategy that creates the Mafia’s sense of community.

But despite its arsenal of “definitive” gestures, the Mafia did not win this time, because the day after Pippo was killed, his carusi, together with tens, hundreds of people, continued his work with the same inspiring courage and determination. They too had their own frailties, shortcomings, and fears, but this is what made them flesh and blood, not heroes free of defects or fears. This is ultimately what Before Night wants to say: Fava’s assassination was savage, extremely savage, but tragically “pointless”, because his disciples have continued his work. Some may argue that it’s a small thing, just a dream… maybe that’s true: it’s just that it’s the dream of something. Daniele Vicari

My memory of Pippo Fava

For more than thirty years, whenever I think of the Giuseppe Fava that I knew, I don’t think of the powerful people who wanted to see him dead, or the mafiosi who did their dirty work, or the corrupt magistrates who scuttled the investigations, or the co-opted journalists who thwarted public opinion to cover up the truth about his murder.

I do not think of the plethora of people who made up Catania’s corrupt government at that time, whose back our newspaper pushed up against the wall for quite some time.

When I think of Giuseppe Fava, I think of a day at the seaside in October, or a Sunday trip to Chiaramonte Gulfi, to that restaurant that is a tribute to pork, with its enormous barbecue at the entrance and the dining area full of smoke. I think of the horsemeat that we ate under Catania's Ursino Castle, or night- time walks between Aci Castello and Capo Mulini, when he told me about his youth in a way that made me want to be there with him, to breathe the scents he had breathed, to meet the people he described with such impassioned precision.

Because, above all, this is who Giuseppe Fava was: a man who loved life deeply, with his entire being, and who did everything with a deep commitment to the stories, places, women and men whom he had encountered during his life. He was not inspired by hatred against anyone, even the Mafia and their powerful accomplices. Actually, I think they felt that the urge to stop him using their weapons precisely because he, rather than simply disregard them, understood their human passions, even their monstrous reasons, and he revealed them, leaving them as naked as the day.

He was inspired by boundless love – I can’t come up with a better word – for human beings, as well as compassion, which for him was not just an empty pronouncement by an intellectual or a politician, instead flesh and blood, his flesh and blood. His battle against the mafia that led to I Siciliani in the last years of his life as a journalist and an intellectual was ultimately an expression of love for his people, whom he dreamt of awakening from centuries of deep sleep, so that they could embrace a better fate, one more worthy of the beautiful land that they have the privilege of inhabiting.

So when they describe him as an anti-mafia journalist, I will always say that he was much more than that: his theatre plays were punches in the gut to conformists, his novels and films say much more about Sicily than any social or anthropological essay, and his paintings are intense and stay with you once you have seen them. Years after we first met, I discovered that he also played the piano, as if there were nothing that he couldn't take on. In his everyday life, he was a foodie, a tennis player, a footballer, a joker, and a charming, charismatic teacher. In some way, he was also kind of a lunatic, because only a lunatic founds a newspaper with no money and ten kids.

Yes, of course, he was a journalist, but here too, in a very atypical, unrestrained way that was far ahead of his time. His style was unmistakable: torrential, literary, and highly imaginative. There were exquisite echoes of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Giovanni Verga in his writing. He traded in hyperboles without betraying reality, which he instead emphasised and handled as a theatrical subject to extract its invisible essence to the fullest: the misery of Palma di Montechiaro lay in the night-time howling of its dogs, who appeared to own the village. The tragedy of the nuclear missiles installed in Comiso could be made out against a beautiful reportage on the scacce, the savoury focaccia made in that area. His portraits of the powerful and the Sicilian mafia do not contain enough evidence to send them into prison, but they relieve the reader of any desire to ever shake their hands. That, of course, is much worse for such people.

He set out his idea of journalism in a 1980 editorial:

“I have an ethical concept of journalism. Indeed, I believe that in a democratic and free society, which is what Italy is supposed to be, journalism is the essential force of society. A journalism based on the truth prevents many instances of corruption, stops violence and crime, and it speeds up the indispensable public works projects. It demands that social services work properly. It keeps law enforcement constantly on the lookout, asks the judicial system to pay constant attention, and requires good governance from politicians. If a newspaper is not able to do this, it becomes responsible even for human lives… A journalist who is unable – through either cowardice or calculation – to tell the truth carries on his conscience all the human pain that he could have prevented, all the suffering, tyranny, corruption, and violence that he was unable to fight. This is his own failure!”

Giuseppe Fava, Pippo to his friends, was born in Palazzolo Acreide in 1925 and died in Catania on January 5, 1984. Today he would be over ninety years old, an unlikely age for a man who seemed to lack any old- age genes in his DNA. I sometimes tell myself that it was a fate that things ended this way, that certain extraordinary men are incapable of doing anything in a trivial way, even dying. The epitaph on his tomb in the Palazzolo cemetery is one of the many questions that he asked of himself and his readers, and which today has become the mantra of hundreds of young journalists, in Sicily and elsewhere: “What is the use of living if you do not have the courage to fight?

Michele Gambino