Diaz - Don't Clean Up This Blood

Diaz - Don't Clean Up This Blood (2012) is Daniele Vicari's historical drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. It compresses a single night in Genoa that left a stain on the Italian state.

In the summer of 2001, hundreds of thousands pour into the city to protest a gathering of the world's richest governments. The streets turn violent, a twenty-three-year-old demonstrator is shot dead, and once it is dark a police unit storms a school building where unarmed marchers and reporters lie asleep. Vicari tells it through several pairs of eyes — a German activist, an elderly pensioner, a veteran Italian journalist — and keeps rewinding to the instant a glass bottle shatters on the pavement.

Claudio Santamaria, Elio Germano and Jennifer Ulrich anchor an ensemble with no rescuing hero. The camera stays dry, almost clinical, which only makes the blows land harder; rights monitors would later call that night the gravest assault on civil liberties any Western democracy had seen since the war. It is a hard watch, and a necessary one. Stream Diaz - Don't Clean Up This Blood (2012) online on iFILM.