Open Doors

The film is set in Palermo in 1937, in Fascist Italy. Tommaso Scalia kills three people: the superior who sacked him, the man who took his job and his own wife. He does not deny it and asks for a quick trial and execution. But the assistant judge hearing the case does not believe in the death penalty and looks for a way not to hand down the verdict the regime expects. The question is not whether the man is guilty but whether the state has the right to kill. It is adapted from Leonardo Sciascia's 1987 novel. Gianni Amelio tells the case not as a thriller but as a quiet refusal: the judge performs no heroism, he simply withholds his signature and pays for it with his career. Gian Maria Volonté plays the part almost without ever raising it. The film was nominated for the foreign language film Oscar. Fascism in its everyday form appears here not as shouting but as a procedure everyone takes for granted.