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Biutifùl Cauntri, Emeralda Calabria, Andrea D’Ambrosio (2007) |
 An Italian Documentary about the garbage problem and its consequences for the animals and the humans living in the area of Napoli - Campania. The film shows the links between the Camorra, the toxic illegal waste and its impact on the cultivation of food. The film is showing small portraits of different inhabitants: shepherds whose sheep’s are dying, farmers with toxic fruits and a teacher who is fighting against the garbage problem in this area.
STORY OF A LAND MASSACRE
“There you go, we offend nature
but we bring nature back to our homes
with its scars, with its laments.”
We often (almost always) forget to think about the link between the fields full of vegetables and the mass of rubbish we daily create. It is a pleasure to walk along cornfields, and lay our glance into the yellow, or again walk into orchards and smell fruit scents. At the same time under our feet there are ebbs and flows of different liquids, safe as the water, unsafe as the chemical fertilizers or again more unsafe as asbestos and gas leaks.
We are registering more and more cases of contaminated fields, especially because of the percolate liquid, which is the black and extremely toxic liquid produced by the landfills waste; very often far off from being drained and captured to be properly disposed of it is just being made run into rivers or land near the landfills. This fact, which should be taken like an emergency by everyone, doesn’t seem to be considered by the society and by the political system. But it concerns our life because it concerns food and water. So what can we do or better what do we have to do?
Emeralda Calabria and Andrea D’Ambrosio have made a documentary, Biutifùl cauntri, to help us reflecting and raise our awareness.
The Italian documentary (Special Mention in the Torino Film Festival 2007) shows different stories, connected to the toxic illegal waste in Naples and to its social-sanitary-economic and human repercussions.
Among others the film shows the story of some shepherds families who, without the possibility of doing something, see their sheep die of dioxin poisoning. The words said by one of them explain us the gravity of a situation which gets stuck with conspiracy of silence: “the sheep eat lettuce, fennel; they eat the same things we eat, produce of the land. That’s how sheep got dioxin inside… here everything is polluted… but they’re still selling fruits”.
Another event tell us about the start of a long investigation which has unveiled a world of illegal dump of hundreds of thousands tons of extremely toxic and dangerous waste (powders to break down toxic fumes in factories, huge variety of waste with a very high percentage of cadmium, aluminium and arsenic…). The biggest problem is that, through a series of illegal practices, this toxic is used by eco-criminals as agricultural compost. So it then ends up in people’s dinner…
The documentary uses a simple technique to report a huge problem: the images flow on open air landfills, on fields surrounded by factories and with these images the words of people, down in this world of waste without wishing it or fighting, with daily bravery, environmental crimes.
The waste problem concerns first of all Naples, Italy and the corrupt Italian political system, always linked to the Mafia power but contemporaneously it concerns all of us because when we talk about illegal waste disposal and the environmental crisis, we talk about food.
Mirtha Sozzi
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