Contrasting shots. Small Sicilian lanes, crowded beaches, children's playgrounds. In the background, a monstrous, sprawling factory and refinery chimneys spewing thick smoke. Once again, François-Xavier Destors explores the territories left behind in Toxicily, his new documentary due in cinemas on September 18, 2024.
After the Rwandan genocide(Rwanda, 2014), the polar and polluted city of Norilsk(Norilsk, l'étreinte de glace, 2018) and the massacre of Senegalese infantrymen at the end of the Second World War(Thiaroye 44, 2022), François-Xavier Destors now turns his attention to thepoisoning of nature and man caused since 1949 by one of Europe's largest petrochemical complexes in Augusta, Sicily.
Equidistant from Syracuse and Catania, the town had all the makings of a veritable little corner of paradise. And the inauguration of the Augusta industrial zone was, at least initially, a beacon of hope and modernity; a veritable Eldorado, as the archive images of the happy, paternalistic workers testify.
Filmed in 2022, Toxicily (a contraction of toxic and Sicily) lifts the veil on this territory and its population, sacrificed on the altar of capitalism and globalization. And to quote the worst horrors, a sad Prévert-style inventory, the ambient stench, the fumes that get in everywhere, the impact on fishing and fish decimated by mercury, the wild toxic waste dumps where cows and sheep graze in complete relaxation. And then there are the children born with genetic malformations, leukemia, tumors and cancers of all kinds.
There are the dead, whom the village priest, Don Palmiro, enumerates - endlessly - at every mass, and then there are those who remain, to whom François-Xavier Destors gives a voice. The new generation, some of whom are carriers of disease, and the old-timers too - some of whom worked at the refinery and bear witness. Together, they navigate between battle and resignation. Abandoned by the state for 40 years, by the carabinieri and even by the Pope, to whom they have appealed, they have become " the sentinels of this territory. "
Why not leave? We didn't choose to live in Augusta; it's a matter of chance," they explain, and " it's better to die of cancer than of starvation. Once owned by Esso, the petrochemical zone was bought by Sonatrach in 2018. Despite abundant evidence of theecocide underway and theimpact on living beings highlighted as early as the 1970s, no clean-up operation has been launched.
Against a backdrop of prevailing omerta, one sentence sums up the situation perfectly: " In fact, what's killing this country is ignorance. " With Roberto Saviano already evoking the burial of toxic waste in his Gomorra , and tourists still flocking to the chemically turquoise waters of Tuscany's Rosignano Solvay beach, how many more warnings and deaths will it take to stand up to capitalism? An edifying documentary that never laments for a moment.
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