“Images are not a fact, the important things are different: people’s health”. This is how Alfonso Pinto, one of the directors of Toxicily, responds to the controversy raised by Fabio Cilea, from Saline di Priolo, regarding the zombie skeleton of a flamingo next to it in the poster of the docu-film.
But perhaps, for the purposes of making the film, the story of a small oasis within Priolo would have been of little value. The images, in fact, tell us something completely different: the difficulty of living next to a petrochemical plant, the fear of leaving one’s homeland, and the battles of those who do not want to remain silent and, in their own small way, wage battles years. First of all Don Palmiro Prisutto who, in church, reads the names of cancer victims.
The documentary Toxicily (France-Italy, 2023, 75′), already released in cinemas, was made by the French director Francois Xavier Destors and the Palermo geographer and photographer Alfonso Pinto, the film is produced by Elda Productions (France) and Ginko Film (Italy) with the support of Eurimages, the Francia Italia CNC MIC fund, Sicilia Film Commission and Rai Cinema, and the patronage of Legambiente.
Seventy years after the arrival of the first refineries, the two authors explore the themes of environmental and health sacrifice, returning the plurality of points of view of the inhabitants themselves: if this industrial enterprise has made it possible to overcome the miseries of a precarious agricultural economy However, by transforming fishermen, farmers and shepherds into workers, it has created both a health emergency, with an increase in diseases and malformations, and an environmental one, with pollution.
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