The conflicting interweaving between health and prosperity, industrial presence and anthropological presence, economic progress, and environmental pollution is as old as human existence, and yet its dramatic outcomes, further exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution, are now evident more than ever. This dichotomy is critically explored in François-Xavier Destors and Alfonso Pinto’s latest effort, Toxicily, which had its world premiere at Festival dei Popoli in Florence, where it scooped a Special Mention for Best Editing and drew attention to a little-known ecological tragedy and is now headed to FIPADOC for its French premiere in the IMPACT strand, where the best films championing social justice, promoting human rights, or protecting the environment are selected.
Toxicily skilfully combines and handles all these three aspects, deep diving into the lives of the citizens of the region of Augusta-Priolo-Melilli-Siracusa, north of Sicily, whose petrochemical plant, one of the biggest in Europe, since 1949 contaminates the area with its toxic fumes, polluting waste and questionable activities of disposal. After many years of silence, the population is starting to acknowledge this alarming and unacceptable reality and putting up a fight against the desperate chase for modernisation.
A history of false promises
The writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (whose novel Il Gattopardo was the inspiration for Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard) had named this area, known for its crystal clear waters, picturesque shores, and lush landscapes, ‘the most beautiful place in Sicily.’ Today, however, this is rather known as ‘the quadrilateral of death.’ Home to Italy’s largest petrochemical refinery, the stretch of coastline between Augusta and Syracuse is at the centre of an alarming health and environmental disaster. Thirty kilometres of territory in which the devastation of the landscape is accompanied by deaths at work, genetic malformations in infants and high rates of oncological diseases.
As archive footage by Istituto Luce reveals, this story goes back to the economic development of the 1950s and a promised brighter future awaiting Sicily and its inhabitants, proudly and joyfully ready to leave the fields to become factory workers. While this dream is now long gone, the plant is still there, producing around 37% of Sicily’s gross domestic product, yet not having increased Syracuse’s quality of life, one of the lowest in the whole country. The last 50 years have witnessed a slow yet gradual awakening, as the ecological disaster that has afflicted the industrial centre and the surrounding area is now impossible to overlook, with polluting materials spilled from the factories taking over land, water, air, and groundwater, and affecting the health of more than 180,000 people living in the area.
After many years of silence, the population is starting to acknowledge this alarming and unacceptable reality…
The voices of resistance
And it is through the open-air landfills, smoke in the air, poisoned almond trees, and flocks of sheep grazing a few metres away from the danger zone, but mainly through the conversations with the suffering population that the directors lead us to the caustic and dramatic core of this film, which slowly discloses the fine line between the promise of a new era and the harsh reality that it conceals. The camera wanders around devastated landscapes, people, and stories, painfully painting a picture of loss, hopelessness, strength, and battle.
From Chiara, who, when she was only seven years old, suffered from a rare malformation of the organs due to the toxic disposals of the site, which had her mother forced to acknowledge the issues at stake and start purchasing imported food only. To Don Palmiro Prisutto, the pastor of Augusta, a key figure in the community, who celebrates the memory of the victims who have succumbed to cancer and other terminal illnesses, named one by one during mass while caring for the lives of those still alive. To the families torn between children who grow up in a poisonous environment and the parents who every day cross the factory doors, entering smelling like talcum powder and leaving stinking like petrol. To the black-hooded and face-masked unknown narrator, who, like the consciousness of this place, guides us through its rotten cracks, denouncing how «around here those who talk take risks. Even though they know things, see things, hear things, the problem is that everyone prefers to ignore them.»
Together with many other members of the community, tired of living on «minefields, where ecological bombs are ready to explode,» they formed a group of militant activists, resisting those who resign themselves to their fate by the old saying «you’d be better off dying of cancer than dying of hunger,» acting as sentries of this territory as much as custodians of the memories and history of this place. And yet a doomed sense of wait and uncertainty seems to hover over the inhabitants who live and work there, being this industrial conglomerate one of the few, if not perhaps the only, employment opportunities in the area.
The question of progress
‘Is this really necessary?’ seems to ask the filmmakers, not only questioning what has been sacrificed on the altar of modernity but also the abstract idea of ‘progress’ itself and this desperate quest for economic growth which never looks at the past but always aims at the present, with an eye to the future. Destors and Pinto’s work manages to concretise the often sugar-coated vagueness of environmental damage, pollution, and industrial threat in all their inhumane cruelty through its slow yet carefully calibrated pace. In this un-coherent whole, the political establishment stands out, moulding and adapting itself to continue with environmental crimes, fostering organized crime, corruption, and a code of silence hidden behind the excuse of the «industrial vocation of the territory.»
The haunting, measuredly rhythmic score, almost a harbinger of misfortune and calamity, is cleverly placed to interrupt silences that speak out loud. The smoke of the smokestacks and the waves on the shore seems to conceal the sense of shameful, fearful gratitude and deepest anger towards this immutable, industrial totem standing still, in its threatening yet reassuring presence, claiming for the camera’s attention even in the rarest instants of joy the film displays.
As we are left finding our fears examined and dissected, having a prescient look at what the near future looks like for us if we keep looking away from this imminent danger and urge to confront the cost of progress, a beacon of hope emerges: by standing together, something can indeed change.
