Mafia Is Not What It Used To Be is a Daring House co-production directed by Franco Maresco. Set in Sicily in 2017, twenty-five years after the Capaci and Via D’Amelio massacres, the film asks what remains of the legacy of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. At its centre are Letizia Battaglia, whose photographs documented the Mafia wars, and Ciccio Mira, a concert promoter who still speaks with nostalgia for the Mafia of the past.
Following Mira’s attempt to stage a neomelodic concert in Palermo in honour of Falcone and Borsellino, Maresco traces the distance between public commemoration and lived reality. The film moves through ceremonies, conversations and performances to examine how the language of anti-Mafia culture can become ritual, while silence and compromise continue to shape the present.
Presented in Official Competition at the 76th Venice International Film Festival, Mafia Is Not What It Used To Be received the Special Jury Prize. The award recognised Maresco’s singular cinematic voice and a film that confronts one of Italy’s deepest wounds without offering easy reassurance.
