16/02/2012

Dora, Paolo, Mohamed. The witnesses’ faces scroll by, suffering, perturbed by the memory of the violence of those days. The account of the torture goes into vivid detail. Terrible physical and psychological violence systematically used by the police on the people who were stopped and arrested during the days of the G8 protest in Genoa (July 19-22, 2001), and mostly conducted in the Bolzaneto barracks.

The Summit [+see also:
trailer
film profile], screened in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival, collects those witness accounts and tries to understand what happened and why. An investigative documentary made by two journalists, Franco Fracassi and Massimo Lauria, who sowed together hundreds of voices, video images, documents and audio recordings in a journey up the national and international command chain which lead to peaceful protesters being hit and the black blocs who destroyed the city to be ignored. The film does not stop at Genoa, but also looks at the Seattle 1999 WTO conference, and at the previous summits of Nice, Prague, Naples and Gothenburg, in order to reveal a precise "directing" of the police.

"We have to consider the incident as an event which was managed on an international level. There was a common strategy, and today’s economic crisis is also a consequence of that G8", the directors explained. Their film received applause from the audience at its screening, which followed by a debate with the participation of German Member of Parliament Hans-Christian Stroebele.

Drawings, animations, computer reconstructions and original material, such as those images which for the first time show the two Molotov cocktails carried by the same officers in the Diaz school as proof allowing them to accuse peaceful protesters. The film also dedicates a lot of space to the murder of young Carlo Giuliani during the clashes. And it ends with a chilling phrase delivered by a policewoman whose phone conversation with a colleague is intercepted: "One nil to us!"

(Translated from Italian)