Mosco Levi Boucault, the godfather of the documentary

Mosco Levi Boucault has been making documentaries for forty years. He says "love the topics that burn," and dedicates his latest documentary (Corleone, godparents godfather, on Arte August 27) to the Sicilian mafia, around the figure of Corleone, his real name Toto Riina. It was for the documentaryist to demystify a figure that fascinated the filmmakers so much that she gave her name to the Coppola film, The Godfather.

For the filmmaker, the question posed by his film is: how can a man enter the mafia? Behind the formidable personality of Toto Riina, there are the testimonies of his former henchmen like those of the lawyers who had to judge him. These striking figures reveal the workings of an organization as complex as the Palermo Mafia, Cosa Nostra. On the other hand, Mosco Levi Boucault points out the fascination he felt for judges Falcone and Borcellino, who paid with their lives the will to do justice.

I can only do documentaries if I tell stories.
(Mosco Levi Boucault)

To fight against the fascination that a character such as Corleone can generate, the director gives voices to all the actors of the extreme violence perpetrated by Corleone and his henchmen. He evokes his fascination for Sigfried, heard for the first time on the transistor he listened to in secret, in the boarding school where he entered at the age of fifteen. It is in the impossible access to culture that he sees the origins of a system as criminal as the one he films here, the mafia. He does not hide the link he had to make with repentants, like Giovanni Brusca, nicknamed "the Butcher", to carry out his search for evidence. More broadly, he discusses his relationship with those he had to interview throughout his career, in the difficult tension between listening and attachment.

Where there is culture, there is much less mafia.
(Mosco Levi Boucault)

In the intermingling of voices, it is the question of mafia crime that is staged: how come we give no price to human life? The induction into the mafia was for these men the possibility of social recognition, so problematic in a land like Sicily. The island has never known any inner power, and power has always been imposed from the outside. In a context of economic disinheritance, the Mafia has become a form of legitimate power, imposing itself by the most unbridled violence. Corleone, godparents godfather fascinates as much as it destabilizes, questioning our fascinations for the most bloodthirsty criminals, and the mechanisms that bring them to the most bloodthirsty power.

Sound sample:

• Corleone, godparents' godfather (Mosco Levi Boucault, Arte)