Lucio Apolito

This is Bologna

Bologna is a bizarre place. However, outside is barbarism. The old city is besieged by a new savannah. Homeless, nomads, tourists, dropouts are only the vanguard of a new citizenship. The ancestors of future kings. This film is a back portrait, an out-of-focus, night-time appearance. We will carefully avoid showing great monuments, famous people and facts of proven historical significance. Instead It’s a portrait that goes for minor fragments, anonymous citizens, intruders. Lies.

Our Most Holy Death

Born at the crossroad between Catholicism, Yoruba and shamanism around the 50’s, then considered a prison cult since the 70’s, the cult of the Santa Muerte since at least ten years has been regarding not exclusively Mexican gangsters‘ spirituality, and it has been diffusing as a popular devotion that became a congregation of three million people in the only Mexico City. Three hundred altars are dedicated to Santa Muerte, a full-size skeleton dressed like a Virgin Mary, to which people ask protection from the crime as well as for the crime, people asks to survive and to be able to kill. The devotion is obviously strong in the most popular districts, where people usually fear for their own life and where the mothers ask her protection for their own sons.