Peppino Impastato in made and unmade scripts: the standards and the limits of engaged cinema

This article offers a critical analysis of two film projects about the life of anti-mafia activist Peppino Impastato: the unmade script Nel cuore della luna, by Antonio Carella (1998), and the completed film I cento passi (Marco Tullio Giordana, 2000), and the various iterations of its own script. Since one project was realized and the other was not, the article begins with the premise that they can collectively enable interesting reflections on the parameters of their genre – the engaged mafia film – and on the limits of what was produceable and what was not in Italy, in the late 1990s. To reach this objective, the essay draws on recent critical work in “unproduction studies” that emphasizes what unrealized projects can tell us about film industry histories. This is followed by a contextual introduction to the various attempts to adapt Impastato’s life to cinema, and in particular these two projects. Subse- quently, the article offers an analysis in two parts of Nel cuore della luna e I cento passi: the first details the shared narrative and representational attributes of the two projects; the second considers their major differences in terms of the production limits mentioned above.