Sicily, early 2000s. After a few years in prison for mafia related crimes, Catello, a career politician, has lost everything. When the Italian intelligence service asks him for help in catching Matteo, his godson and the last prominent fugitive mafia boss out there, Catello seizes the opportunity to get back in the game. A cunning man with a hundred faces, a tireless illusionist who turns truth into lies and lies into truth, Catello launches into a peculiar and unlikely exchange of letters with the fugitive, whose emotional void he tries to exploit.For their third feature film, the two authors portray the instigator of the crime that was the subject of their previous film: Castelvetrano crime boss Matteo Messina Denaro (in the top ten most wanted fugitives in the world since 1993) responsible for countless murders, with a key role in the Mafia massacres of the 1990s and captured only in 2023 because he was terminally ill with cancer. For the screenplay, the two authors were freely inspired by the epistolary exchanges between Matteo Messina Denaro and former Castelvetrano mayor Antonino Vaccarino, published in the book “Lettere a Svetonio” (2008). A complex film in which, with their signature skill, the filmmakers masterfully calibrate a multiplicity of perspectives: an underlying realism that is combined with a kind of abstraction in handling spaces, décor, costumes and colors, which is layered with symbols, with references to a mythical, ancestral horizon. A dark and powerful film, in which no one is saved, not the state, whose system of justice is punctually suspended in an incompleteness that smacks so much of collusion, not the corrupt politician, portrayed with grotesque brilliance by Toni Servillo, not the mafioso, played with equal bravura by Elio Germano who represents the bleak rabid, desperation of a man who lives practically segregated in a room dictating pizzini (handwritten messages personally delivered to recipients by his accomplices) and trying to complete a puzzle of Sicily, haunted by a past of bloody memories and the ghost of a violent father.  Teresa Cavina