Sicily is known for its heavenly beaches, its crystal clear seas and its picture-postcard landscapes as promoted by Dolce&Gabbana, but all too few are aware of what’s actually bubbling away beneath the surface and lingering in the air. The epicentre of the ”ecocide” (a term used by the directors themselves) explored by director François-Xavier Destros and geography and visual cultures researcher Alfonso Pinto in the movie Toxicily [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], which screened in the Festival dei Popoli’s Italian competition, is the city of Siracusa or, to be more precise, the region of Augusta-Priolo-Melilli-Siracusa. Here, picture-postcard Sicily gives way to toxic Sicily, which few people have the courage to acknowledge, given how frightening the reality is.

The cause of this tragedy, which locals in the area are living through first-hand and which goes hand in hand with foetal abnormalities, tumours and serious respiratory illnesses, is the greed of the oil industry. Since 1949, the industrial outskirts of Augusta have been home to one of the biggest petrochemical plants in Europe, composed of gigantic factories and veritable villages, now abandoned, which were once home to the many workers employed in the sector. Whilst the riches accumulated by sector leaders have been stratospheric, the rewards reaped by the many workers, who left agricultural employment behind to become resigned but proud workers, are nothing more than crumbs. It’s a situation made even sadder when we think of the risks the latter took and continue to take, exposed as they are to highly toxic and carcinogenic chemical substances. “It’s better to die of cancer than of hunger” is one of the phrases we continually hear in the film, a mantra which many living in these parts repeat, as if wanting to convince themselves that the compromise they accepted was in some sense inevitable.

Many of these employees are resigned to their situation, like sacrificial lambs destined to sustain an increasingly voracious and cruel form of globalisation. But there are some who refuse to accept it, and it’s to them that Toxicily is dedicated. Between those who accept and those who resist, the film portrays a region caught between paradise and hell, breathtaking natural beauty and nauseating chemical odours, in a constant dialogue between what you see and what you know (even if we’d rather not know). The tragic stories told by those denouncing their intolerable situation, when placed alongside bucolic shots of grazing cows and almond trees which they know are poisoned, resonate tragically in our minds and urge us to think about the exorbitant cost of “progress”.

Sobering, accurate and tragically poetic, Toxicily gets straight to the heart of the matter, exploring a health and environmental emergency which can no longer be ignored and which continues to claim victims against a backdrop of more or less generalised indifference. Paradoxical, wonderful but also terrifying, the Sicily depicted by the French-Italian directorial duo urges us to ask what our future will look like if we keep on refusing to open our eyes.

Toxicily is produced by French firm Elda Productions together with Italy’s Ginko Films. Lightdox are managing international sales.