XXIII edition
10/15 December 2013

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Poliziotto
Nicola Longo followed up La valle delle farfalle (the true story of "a police officer from southern Italy who joins the Narcotics Squad and, working undercover, proves his love for his country") with Poliziotto, inspired by his meeting Federico Fellini. Written in 1981, the book shows that Fellini wanted to make a crime drama, and explains that the project never came to fruition due to disagreements between the filmmaker and the production company. Says Longo: "Federico Fellini tried to make La Mala Vita but he didn’t see it as a crime story in the classic sense. He wanted faces, atmospherics, landscapes." Shelved for 20 years, until recently, Poliziotto is a pre-screenplay, a dialogue between a maestro of Italian cinema and his "pistol-carrying poet" [what Fellini called Longo], which paints a clear portrait of Rome’s criminal underworld of the 1970s and 80s. "Over the years, many publishers and directors asked me if they could turn it into a book or a film, but I never thought it was important after Fellini died, until a few months ago, when certain events in [Italy] and listening to university students and adolescents made me realize just how often and how much more frequently 'criminals' are becoming models of choice for the new generations."

Nicola Longo was born in Calabria, in the Gioia Tauro plain. Boxing led him to the police force; he became an undercover detective and worked with the DEA and the FBI. He infiltrated an organized crime syndicate in Marseilles, carrying out a legendary operation that led to the dismantling of heroin labs in the city and the arrest of Jack Masia, the Corsican-Marseilles boss who for many years dominated international heroin trafficking. Various Italian cop dramas made in the 1970s and 80s were based on him, including a series of films starring Tomas Milian as Marshal Nicola Gilardi. Left seriously wounded in a shootout in 1978, during his convalescence Longo wrote a moderately successful fairy tale on drug prevention that caught the interest of Tonino Guerra, who urged him to embark on a writing career. He retired from the State Police force in 2004 as a Commissioner, to teach Advanced Investigation Techniques at Rome’s La Sapienza University. He is on the scientific committee of the University of L’Aquila, in the department of Investigative Sciences.

Poliziotto, Castelvecchi, Roma, 2013
La valle delle farfalle, Koinè, Roma, 2007


PROGRAM

10/12/2013 h 17:30Jardin de l'Ange
Presented by Giorgio Gosetti