Synopsis
Peppino Impastato is a quick-witted lad growing up in a Sicilian village in the late 1960s. He lives in a family with Mafia connections, one hundred steps away from the house of Tano Badalamenti, the Mafia boss who lords it over Cinisi.Although the atmosphere in the family seems quite normal there is something disconcerting which rankles in Peppino's mind: his mother's troubled looks, the tragic death of a close relative, the lack of answers to his questions. Peppino goes through his adolescence during the time around 1968 and just like other young people in many countries he also gets ready to rebel against authority, but with a difference: whereas for- his contemporaries in big cities this means rejecting traditional middle-class values and paternal authority. in Sicily it involves defying the very status of the Mafia. Together with a group of young people that cherish the same ideals, Peppino sets up a newspaper denouncing corruption and illegal speculation, then a radio station where he runs Crazy Wave, a program that ridicules the taboos of silence and pillories the local untouchables. His family is divided - father tries to make him shut up, mother and brother back him. The impossible relationship between a father dominated by fear and a son filled with courage and imagination comes to an end when the father dies in a strange car accident. Peppino is now without any protection, and menacing threats begin to arrive. At the same time, his political commitment comes to a head: he decides to stand for local elections in a small left-wing party.
He is murdered in 1978 - two days before the polls open - blown to pieces by six kilos of TNT. The authorities first see it as an accident, as though Peppino were an incompetent, provincial terrorist killed by his own bomb, then get to a more insulting and elusive conclusion - suicide, they say.
Twenty years later, Palermo’s attorney general re-opens the case and commits Tano Badalamenti - now in jail in die United States - for trial as instigator of the murder.
