Review: The Sicilian Girl DVD

By
Laurence
– November 22, 2010Find Others: DVD, Movie, ReviewGet More: , ,

The Sicilian Girl DVD boxSTUDIO: Music Box | DIRECTOR: Marco Amenta | CAST: Veronica D’Agostino, Gérard Jugnot, Francesco Casisa, Marcello Mazzarella, Mario Pupella
RELEASE DATE: 11/30/10 | PRICE: DVD $29.95
BONUSES: featurette
SPECS: NR | 110 min. | Foreign-language drama | 1.85:1 widescreen | Dolby Digital 5.1 | Italian with English subtitles

RATINGS (out of 5): Movie  | Audio  | Video  | Overall

Italian film The Sicilian Girl is based on the true story of how 17-year-old Rita Atria (Veronica D’Agostino) broke the Sicilian Mafia’s code of silence when she provided testimony about the local criminal activities in her village to the Palermo magistrate Paolo Borsellino (Gérard Jugnot), an action that was sparked by the murder of her father and brother, who were Mafia members.

The subsequent prosecution and trial in 1991, based on the diaries Atria kept since she was a child, resulted in the conviction of a group of powerful Sicilian syndicate members.

Presented as a relatively straight-ahead, no-frills dramatic narrative with some thriller elements by co-writer/director Marco Amenta (who covered the same material earlier in his 1997 One Girl Against the Mafia: The Diary of a Sicilian Girl), The Sicilian Girl works best when D’Agostino is on screen. As Atria (who sadly committed suicide in 1992 following the murder of Borsellino, who had become a sort of father figure/protector to her), her depiction of the young girl’s curiosity, anger, fear, confusion and desire to avenge the murders of the men in her family brings a spark to the film that’s lacking in other scenes.

The DVD includes a behind-the-scenes featurette that covers the film’s production and information on the ultimately sad stories of the real-life people who are dramatized in the film.

 

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.