Topics : FILM : An Italian Tragedy

Italy beckoned German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta six years ago. Known abroad for her intense dramas that focus on passionate, complex women (“Marianne and Juliane” in 1981, “Rosa Luxemburg” in 1986), she has made three films in Italy since moving permanently to Rome.

Her most recent film, “The Long Silence,” is a contemporary story of political corruption in Italy and centers on a woman gynecologist (Carla Gravina) who is married to a prosecutor (Jacques Perrin) investigating Mafia ties to government officials.

Living with death threats and a horde of bodyguards, their lives are physically and emotionally restricted. The suspenseful film, released last year, lays bare the tragic price Italian society--especially honest individuals and their families--has paid for trying to stop the corruption.

Von Trotta is well-known in Italy. Yet the film, which is in Italian, received virtually no distribution there after an initial screening in Palermo, Sicily, in March, 1993, said Felice Laudadio, “The Long Silence” writer-producer with whom she lives. Most of the 30 theaters that had booked the film canceled plans to show it after that screening.

The filmmakers suspect that some people, probably the Mafia, pressured theater owners to not show the film. It ran in Rome, Milan and five other cities for only a few days before it was shut down. “People wanted to see this film,” Laudadio said.

“It was sort of a very strange boycott then,” von Trotta said in a recent telephone interview from Rome.

“The Long Silence” comes to Los Angeles as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival that starts Friday night at the Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles. It will also be shown June 16.

Von Trotta and Laudadio were motivated to make the film after the 1992 murders of the two leading Mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Von Trotta and Laudadio recalled the furor and desperation Italians felt at that time.

“Everybody asked himself, ‘What can we do? What could be an immediate answer? To say ‘No, it can’t go on like this?’ ” Laudadio said.

“ ‘We have the cinema, so let’s do something out of it,’ ” Von Trotta said. “On one hand, yes, I am still German, living here. I’m in a way an outsider. But on the other hand, when I saw both these killings, the consequences, I cried like every Italian cried.”

Von Trotta went to Palermo and met with several widows of prosecutors.

Because these women were familiar with her film, “Marianne and Juliane”--about sisters, one who works within the system, the other a terrorist--”They already knew that I didn’t want to use them just to make a spectacle out of their lives,” she said. “I was interested in their way of feeling, also in their way of thinking and living after the deaths. They were very helpful.

“Only after this meeting I thought, ‘I have to do the film, also for these women.’ It’s a political film and it’s a film which is dealing with a certain moment in Italy, but it tells the story from the woman’s point of view, from her life, her fear, her love for this man.” And how she goes on after his death.

Last year’s screening in Palermo was organized with a Sicilian women’s association established to counteract the Mafia. “That was a screening in front of 1,000 people,” von Trotta said. “There were some judges and (prosecutors) with their bodyguards and there were some very angry people. There was a big tension.”

After the screening, von Trotta and actress Gravina joined a group of widows to discuss the film with the audience. During that exchange, a woman stood up and told the audience, “You all know who killed my husband and you never will say it,” von Trotta said. At the Palm Springs Film Festival, Laudadio had told a “Long Silence” audience this woman also declared that the suspected killers were in the theater.

“It was a very strong moment,” von Trotta said.

Von Trotta also remembered a man in attendance who described the film as “the first really anti-Mafia film because I’m not using all this blood and spectacular things, which then makes a pleasure out of the film, like all these war films,” she said. “I just tried to show the consequences toward the people inside, which is much crueler than to only (show) dead bodies or blood.

“All the Mafia films, where you always see people running around with guns and shooting--it’s a genre in a way. I tried to kill the genre, or to go in another way. It comes from inside, the tension.”

In the end, the film is a call for people “not to always be the victims,” Von Trotta said.

For now, Von Trotta has returned to her German roots, spending the last year in Berlin to make a love story set in the Berlin Wall era. Tentatively titled “The Years of the Wall,” it begins with the construction of the wall and ends the first night of its dismantling, Nov. 9, 1989. It is expected to debut in Italy at the Venice Film Festival in September.

“The Long Silence” screens Friday at 9:30 p.m. and June 16 at 9 p.m. at the Nuart Theater, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles. (310) 478-6379.