MiBAC - Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali
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Netflix
The incredible true story behind the most controversial Italian court cases in recent years. Stefano Cucchi was arrested for a minor crime and mysteriously found dead during his detention. In one week's time, a family is changed forever.
"When Stefano Cucchi died in the early hours of October 22, 2009, it was the 148th death in an Italian prison that year. By December 31, the figure would have risen to the incredible number of 176: in two months, 30 more deaths. In the seven days between his arrest and his death, Stefano Cucchi came into contact with 140 people, between carabinieri, judges, agents of the penitentiary police, doctors and nurses. And only a few, very few, of them had any inkling of the drama he was going through.
It was the impact of these figures, the total number of deaths in prison and of individuals encountered by Stefano during his detention, that prompted me to tell his story: they are shocking numbers, because those numbers are people. Of the whole affair, the controversy, the trials, it is the obvious but at the same time distressing impossibility for the victim to defend himself, to explain himself, that touched me deeply: everyone can talk about him, except him. Well, On My Skin stems from the desire to snatch Stefano away from the dramatic fixity of the terrible photos with which we are all familiar - the ones showing him lying dead on the postmortem cot - and bring him back to life, letting him move and speak again. On My Skin, among various other things, is a way of combatting, of opposing the greatest of injustices: silence. Of all the words that have been spent on his case over the years these are, for me, the most illuminating: 'It is not acceptable, from a social and civil point of view even more than from a legal one, for a person to die, and not from natural causes, while in the care and responsibility of organs of the state'" (Giuseppe Pignatone, public prosecutor of Rome).
Alessio Cremonini (Rome, 1973) is an Italian film and television director. He started working as an assistant director in the TV series Amico Mio by Paolo Poeti and then in the cinema as an assistant to Ettore Scola in the film La Cena. In 1997 he wrote and directed a four-hand short film with Camilla Costanzo in 35 mm titled Marta inserted in an episodic film The Italian Shorts presented at the Venice Film Festival. In 2000 he wrote the film Voices based on the homonymous novel by Dacia Maraini directed by Franco Giraldi. In 2004 with Camilla Costanzo and Saverio Costanzo he wrote the screenplay for Private, directed by Saverio Costanzo. In 2013 he writes, directs and co-produces together with Francesco Melzi d'Eril, Border, a film shot in Arabic on the Syrian war. Will be presented at the Toronto, Rome, Tokyo, Cleveland, Belfast, etc. In 2016, with Lisa Nur Sultan he wrote the screenplay for On My Skin, based on documents and facts actually happened concerning the story of Stefano Cucchi.
