05/03/2025 - Alessandro Tonda’s political-thriller-toned film captures the human side of the controversial story of secret agent Nicola Calipari, who was killed by American soldiers in Baghdad

The death of Nicola Calipari, killed in Baghdad in 2005 by “friendly fire” coming from American soldiers as he carried journalist Giuliana Sgrena to safety, who’d been held prisoner by Islamic Jihad for a month, is one of the most troubling Italian mysteries of recent years. The head of SISMI, as Italy’s military secret service was known at the time, Calipari may have been the victim of an internal war raging within the Italian intelligence system. The Negotiator - which was also the protagonist’s code name - sees director Alessandro Tonda (who directed The Shift [+see also:
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interview: Alessandro Tonda
film profile] in 2020, about an Islamic terrorist attack in Brussels) depicting this tragic and controversial affair. The film is released in Italian cinemas on 6 March via Notorious Pictures.

On 4 February 2005 in Baghdad, a group of armed men abducted journalist Giuliana Sgrena (Sonia Bergamasco) who worked for the Italian communist daily paper Il manifesto. Accused of concealing weapons of mass destruction (which were never found), Iraq was occupied by US marines and troops from the UK, Australia and Poland.  After a month of imprisonment, on 4 March, Al Jazeera announced the journalist’s release. Once the vehicle belonging to the Italian secret services which was transporting Giuliana Sgrena and Nicola Calipari (Claudio Santamaria) had arrived at Baghdad airport where an aeroplane was waiting to take them home to Italy, it was riddled with bullets shot from a machine gun located close to an American checkpoint. Nicola Calipari died at the scene while Giuliana Sgrena and the driver were injured.

The film sets out the facts at a dry and nervous pace, moving between Rome and Baghdad, following the various stages of the negotiations expertly led by Calipari, and alluding to ambiguous manoeuvring behind the scenes. We witness the decision to avoid another CIA blitz at all costs, whose previous hostage “extractions” have proved disastrous. We see a senior official in Rome, a colleague of Calipari’s, who openly impedes his work on the ground. There’s the frantic search for a “conduit”, a meeting in Dubai with an influential representative living in exile and belonging to the Sunni minority, who are now excluded from key places in Iraq and responsible for attacks on and abductions of westerners. We’re shown the long days the journalist spends imprisoned at the hands of Jihad. In the final 30 minutes, the film’s action comes thick and fast, so much so that it starts to feel like a political thriller about freeing hostages, along the lines of Ben Affleck’s brilliant movie Argo, Stéphane Rybojad’s sloppy French film Special Forces [+see also:
trailer
film profile], or José Padilha’s British work Entebbe [+see also:
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trailer
film profile].

It’s true that Belgian talent Bruno Degrave’s photography captures the hot colours and “exotic” atmospheres that are typical of war-based action movies of a western flavour, which dramatise real events to gripping effect. But The Negotiator is actually more interested in capturing the human and political side of the story. On the one hand - without going into the details of an event which resulted in investigations, trials and diplomatic pressure - the film embraces a more anti-American theory of a conspiracy and the intentional murder of the Italian agent. On the other, it focuses on the great nobility of spirit of a man who, with the simple, instinctive and heroic gesture of using his own body to protect the woman he was bringing home, now represents “one of our country’s great souls", according to the actor playing him, Claudio Santamaria. Illustrious screenwriter Sandro Petraglia has left plenty of room for the protagonist’s private life, the friendship which bound him to the director of Sgrena’s daily newspaper over those tumultuous weeks and his relationship with his family: notably his wife (Anna Ferzetti) who doesn’t ask a think when he leaves on a sudden mission and his teenage daughter who goes along to the protest demanding withdrawal from Iraq.

The Negotiator is an Italian-Belgian co-production by Notorious Pictures together with RAI Cinema and Tarantula, in collaboration with Netflix and Alkon Communications.

(Translated from Italian)