Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy

On 12 December 1969 a bomb is placed in the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Milan and seventeen people die. The investigation turns towards anarchists. Giuseppe Pinelli, a railway worker taken into custody, dies falling from a fourth-floor window at police headquarters. Luigi Calabresi, the officer in the interrogation room, is shot in the street three years later. The subject is not who planted the bomb but how the state steered its own investigation. The film builds the links between far-right groups, the secret services and prosecutors step by step, and narrates it like the reading of a case file rather than a thriller. The form is dense and demands work from the viewer. Names, dates and institutions arrive one after another; for anyone without a grounding in Italian history it is hard to follow. The production caused argument in Italy because the case is still not legally closed: nobody was definitively convicted of the bombing and Pinelli's death was filed as an accident. The film draws Pinelli and Calabresi not as enemies but as two men caught inside the same machinery. Valerio Mastandrea plays Calabresi and Pierfrancesco Favino plays Pinelli. Marco Tullio Giordana directs. Who it is for: viewers curious about Italy's years of lead. Who it is not for: anyone coming without the background; the film narrates rather than explains.