PRODUCTIONS: FREE AS HIS NAME

DIRECTOR

PRODUCER

DURATION

VERSIONS

FORMAT

Pietro Durante

Pietro Durante

58 minutes

HD

Twenty years have passed. In a letter published on the front page of the Giornale di Sicilia newspaper, Libero Grassi, Palermo businessman, speaks directly to the extortionists pressing him for protection money. It is the 10th of January 1991. For many it is a date which marks the beginning of the fight back against the rackets. From that moment on, no one could say “I didn't know”. There is no statue to commemorate Libero Grassi, nor a square or a street named after him. Libero Grassi has a hand-written plaque and a red mark, re-painted every year by his wife and children, on the pavement where the killers of Cosa Nostra shot him down from behind. Many years later, his ideas have unleashed a possible revolution which today involves over ten thousand citizens of Palermo who recognise themselves in the phrase:

“A WHOLE PEOPLE WHO PAYS THE PIZZO IS A PEOPLE WITHOUT DIGNITY”

In this documentary, the story of Libero Grassi is relived by his wife and children, who also tell another story, that of his moral legacy. The young people of Addiopizzo, and a businessman who, like Grassi, rebelled, together with the president of the Libero Futuro association which assists businesspeople who are victims of Mafia extortion and who modified the Confindustria industrial association's code of ethics, describe an extraordinary Palermo fired with a new popular dignity. Thus, Libero Grassi's dream will come true. He was killed on the 29th of August 1991, but “he died as a living person”. He was not a hero, he was a “normal Sicilian” who liked to say that, in line with all the choices he made, his was “more an adjective than a name”.