Film

Cutro, Calabria, Italia
2024, Italy, film documentary, 70 min

Direction: Mimmo Calopresti
Funded: Fondazione Calabria Film Commission
Production: Silvia Innocenzi e Giovanni Saulini
Editing: Irene Vecchio for Alfa Multimedia

Synopsis
On 26 February 2023, a boat – an old wooden caique – sank in Steccato di Cutro, in the province of Crotone, Calabria. Inside the boat, which left from Izmir, Turkey, on 21 February, were 180 human beings, mostly of Afghan, Pakistani, Syrian, Turkish, Somali and Iraqi origin. Women, men and children. The shipwreck took the lives of 91 people, including 25 children. The boat, 150 metres from the shore, surrendered before the violence of the waves and the sharp points of the rocks. Who are the victims and survivors of the shipwreck? They are individuals who have fled their lands for a variety of causes: armed conflicts, persecution (religious, gender), poverty, climate change, the right to aspire to a better existential path, the need to regain dignity, to work, to study and to form a family. The parish priest of Steccato di Cutro said: ‘I saw the blood of Jesus Christ on the sand’. Cutro is a municipality of 10,000 inhabitants. The people of Cutro were not indifferent to the disaster off Steccato. They did not react to a news event, but found themselves in a moment of history, in a strip of suppressed humanity. And so, one feels the need to understand, to move from Rome and go to Cutro, to document, to stop in front of such a tragedy, to narrate, with humility, beyond the limitations of the political class (in Italy and Europe), of bureaucratic language, of mass media rituals. To undertake an inner journey, as Pier Paolo Pasolini did, who chose Cutro as the location for his film ‘The Gospel according to St. Matthew’. And those waters, which welcomed the Gospel, became the stage for the catastrophe. Without prejudice, snootiness, sociological intentions, we will listen to those people to get to know them in depth. To draw a line of humanity, to unite pain with hope.