Pollution
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Dedicated to the victims of pollution in a petrochemical zone in eastern Sicily, the film remains on the surface of its ambitious subject.
The petrochemical zone of Augusta-Priolo is located north of Syracuse, in eastern Sicily. The place is less famous than on the same coast, Taormina, Etna, Catania, or the great ancient theater of Syracuse on which the documentary by François-Xavier Destors and Alfonso Pinto ends with beautiful solemnity. Augusta does not appear in any Routard guide and for good reason: no one has any interest in praising its peeled charms, contaminated lands and fruits and the lists of cancer victims whose names are recited by the whistleblower priest in front of a few residents grouped together in an association. The “zone film” that is Toxicly (contraction of the title with too clever crassness) resolutely moves away from the tourist area to film the desolation and ruins of the disaster area. The pollution of the industrial complex cutting the horizon of the sea and the fields of fig trees with its bristling chimneys, its vats sometimes forming, at night, an apocalyptic landscape with the beauty of catastrophes, makes it a forbidden zone, “danger of death”, where cows graze and fish die before feeding men.
There is the weight of the subject, the ambition of the project, and the more anecdotal result of the film. Well started and filmed, it quickly repeats the same lamentation for an hour
