Italians flock to film on police violence

Thousands gather for film about 2009 death

Thousands of Italians are flocking to illegal free public screenings of a new film about a young man’s 2009 death in custody, a potent symbol of police violence and a merciless penal system.

In city piazzas and lecture theaters around the country, community groups and student organizations are showing pirated versions of the Netflix film Sulla mia pelle, or On My Skin.

The film tells the tragic story of Stefano Cucchi, 31, who was arrested in Rome in October 2009 in possession of 20 grams of hashish and two grams of cocaine.

Director Alessio Cremonini’s film has bounced from the red carpet of the Venice Film Festival, where it premiered last month, into the collective conscience of Italian youths living under a populist, right-wing government.

Some of the 2,000 people who attended a screening at Rome’s prestigious La Sapienza university on Friday were reduced to tears.

“What happened to Stefano Cucchi could have happened to any one of us,” said Teo, a 27-year-old cameraman.

Student Luca Matteuzzi said the film was “both hard and beautiful. Violent without showing any blood.

“It doesn’t show the police as animals but it points the finger at a timorous bureaucracy that is incapable of facing its responsibilities.”

In the film Cucchi, who suffered from epilepsy, spends a week going through the system, at police stations and then Rome’s central Regina Coeli prison.

Despite being covered in bruises and barely able to walk, a judge remands him into custody and he eventually ends up in the prison infirmary, where he dies a week after being arrested.

The already slight Cucchi weighed just 37 kilograms when he died, and his family took shocking photos of his emaciated and battered body in the morgue.

His sister Ilaria has fought for justice for years, trying to establish who was responsible for her brother’s death nearly a decade ago.

However despite years of legal battles no one has yet been successfully prosecuted.

Five police officers are currently on trial over the affair, three of them charged with manslaughter.

“It’s moving to see how things are being organized spontaneously to see my brother’s story,” Ilaria Cucchi told AFP.